the weekly
Standard
NOVEMBER 27, 1995
John J. Dilulio, Jr
diagnoses America
TICKING
CRIME
BOMB
William Tucker
How Civil Courts
Have Gone Wild
Andrew Peyton Thomas
Defend Your Town
Get a Tax Break
Pat Buchanan, Leftist • DAVID Frum
Bill Clinton Overplays His Hand • FRED BARNES
Memo to GOP: No Need to Panic • The EDITORS
When the Media Gather to Blather • MATT LABASH
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 11 • NOVEMBER 27, 1995
the weekly
Standard
2 SCRAPBOOK Burke not Borked; Dems not truthful; and more.
4 CASUAL Jay Nordlinger gives thanks for presidential rhetoric.
6 CORRESPONDENCE
9 EDITORIAL Memo to GOP: No Need to Panic
11 SHUTDOWN I: CLINTON
The president tacks left, right, center, and often. By Fred Barnes
12 SHUTDOWN II: THE HILL
Republican calculations at the budget’s high noon. By Matthew Rees
13 I MADE HAZEL’S ENEMIES LIST
Through the Clinton cabinet blows a Nixonian wind. By Irwin I. Stelzer
15 POOR-MOUTHING UNCLE SAM
Standard & Poor’s has entered the budget fray. Hmm. By James Higgins
16 DEMOCRATIC COMPLEX
A confused, vapid, and lonely strand of donkey. By Andrew Ferguson
18 WHY NEWT MUST RUN
Though he may prefer to wait, his time is now. By Arianna Huffington
20 MEDISCARE TACTICS
A look at some recent political shenanigans. By Christopher Caldwell
23
SUPER-PREDATORS
Juvenile crime and what it
means for America.
By John J. Dilulio, Jr.
28 FOR A ‘‘FRANKPLEDGE"
An old-time practice could make communi¬
ties safer. By Andrew Peyton Thomas
29 DECRIMINALIZE CRIME
If only the rules of civil procedure applied
to the real bad guys. By William Tucker
33 BUCELANAN, LEFTIST
“From the left. I’m”... Patrick J. Buchanan?
Not as bizarre as it sounds. By David Frum
37 WOODEN PANELS IN WASHINGTON
When the media gather to talk about themselves, zzzzz. By Matt Labash
40 THE VILLAGE IDIOT
At 40, the Village Voice is only, and sadly, freak-left. By Daniel Radosh
42 YEAR OF THE UGLY DOLLAR
Just what does the Treasury have against beauty? By Henry Hope Reed
45 JAMES BOND, STRAIGHT UP
007 is not only back, but restored. By John Podhoretz
46 CONSERVATIVE BOHEMIA
What the right needs is a bohemia all its own. By Michael Anton
48 PARODY
Memorable bites from Sperling Breakfasts down the centuries.
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
William Kristol
EXECUTIVE EDITOR DEPUTY EDITOR
Fred Barnes John Podhoretz
OPINION EDITOR
David Tell
SENIOR EDITORS
David Brooks, Andrew Ferguson
MANAGING EDITORS
Richard Starr, Claudia Winkler
SENIOR WRITER
Christopher Caldwell
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
David Frum, Robert Kagan, Charles Krauthammer,
Tod Lindberg, P J. O’Rourke
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Scott M. Morris, Jay Nordlinger
STAFF WRITERS
Tucker Carlson, Matt Labash, Matthew Rees
ART DIRECTOR
Kent Bain
DESIGN CONSULTANT
Henry Nolan
RESEARCH DIRECTOR
Daniel McKivergan
REPORTER
Neomi Rao
DEPUTY PUBLISHER
James L. Pitts
BUSINESS MANAGER
Jennifer L. Komosa
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
Francine M. McMahon
ADVERTISING CONSULTANT
James D. McVey
SUBSCRIPTION DIRECTOR
Dianne H. Snively
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANTS
Kathleen Connolly, Polly Coreth, Doris Ridley
STAFF ASSISTANTS
Josephine DeLorenzo, Catherine Edwards,
Rebecca Gustafson
PUBLICITY
Juleanna Glover
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Cover illustration by Jeffrey Lynch
NOVEMBER 27, 1995
The Weekly Standard /1
Casual
Giving Thanks
I t is mid-November, and every
aficionado of presidential
speechcraft knows what that
means: the issuance of the Thanks¬
giving proclamation. This is a rare
and wondrous species of rhetoric. It
is homiletic and hortatory; histori¬
cal and political; admonitory and
prayerful. In it, the president has a
chance to honor some aspect of the
past; take stock of the present;
press a partisan point or two;
and—without controversy—wax
unabashedly religious. Many of the
proclamations still astound for
their beauty and power; others are
more perfunctory and forgettable.
But they never fail to be interest¬
ing, and to reveal something of
their times and their authors.
The first proclamation came
from the first president, at the
behest of the first Congress. Here,
as elsewhere, Washington set the
standard. He invited Americans to
“unite in rendering . . . sincere and
humble thanks” for, among other
“signal and manifold mercies,” the
“course and conclusion of the late
war.” John Adams continued the
custom, with long and erudite
proclamations, resonant of the
Book of Common Prayer , with dash¬
es of the Federalist Papers thrown in.
Jefferson demurred entirely, believ¬
ing the proclamations beyond the
purview of his constitutional pow¬
ers. This might be expected from a
man wracked with guilt over the
Louisiana Purchase, but, still, the
Jefferson proclamations would be
among the glories of the form.
Lincoln’s are indeed glorious.
They recall everything that was
sublime and ingenious about that
president. Remarkable about the
proclamation for 1863 is that it cel¬
ebrates the ordinary rhythms of
American life, ongoing despite a
“civil war of unequalled magnitude
and severity.” (“Needful diversions
of wealth and of strength . . . have
not arrested the plough, the shuttle
or the ship; the axe has enlarged
the borders of our settlements....”)
The 1864 proclamation begins, “It
has pleased Almighty God to pro¬
long our national life another
year”—quaint-seeming now, per¬
haps, but no certain proposition
then. The Reconstruction procla¬
mations—of Andrew Johnson, of
Grant—appealed fervently for the
healing of grievances.
P roclamations of Thanksgiving
Day reflect, appropriately
enough, the presidents issuing
them. Theodore Roosevelt’s are
like him: virile, learned, no-non-
sense. (“We live in easier and more
plentiful times than our forefathers,
the men who with rugged strength
faced the rugged days.”) Wilson’s
are quintessentially Wilsonian, the
work of a master rhetorician—the
minister’s son, the Princeton wiz¬
ard—in full command of language
religious and political. (“God has in
His good pleasure given us
peace_It has come as a great tri¬
umph of Right. Complete victory
has brought us, not peace alone, but
the confident promise of a new day
as well, in which justice shall
replace force and jealous intrigue
among the nations.”) Hoover’s are
models of spare eloquence. In the
teeth of the Depression, the former
food administrator, vilified as indif¬
ferent, poignantly implored Ameri¬
cans to “remember that many of
our people are in need and suffer¬
ing from causes beyond their con¬
trol.”
FDR used the proclamations of
his first two terms to spread the
gospel of his new civil religion. We
can fairly hear that matchless voice
as it speaks the locutions of the
day: “the goal of mutual help”; “the
new spirit of dependence one on
another”; a “closer fellowship of
mutual interest and common pur¬
pose.”
K ennedy’s most memorable
proclamation came in 1963; it
had to be read by the new presi¬
dent, Lyndon Johnson. Possibly
the sauciest line of any proclama¬
tion occurs at the beginning of
Johnson’s for 1968, that ghastly
“year of the ramparts”: “Americans,
looking back on the tumultuous
events of 1968, may be more
inclined to ask God’s mercy and
guidance than to offer Him thanks
for his blessings.”
A Carter proclamation tends to
bring to mind the worst of the
Carter style: reproachful, guilt-
mongering, malaise-infused. With
Reagan, the theme is freedom. Here
is a dose of pure Gipperism from
1981, amid the budget wars: “Long
before there was a government wel¬
fare program, th[e] spirit of volun¬
tary giving was ingrained in the
American character.”
Bill Clinton? It will shock no
one that last year’s proclamation
was pointedly political, well
beyond the norm for this forum. It
featured a plaintive call for “mean¬
ingful work experience” (i.e., not
“Mcjobs”) and “protective health
care” (i.e., the sprawling, repudiat¬
ed plans of the first lady).
The Thanksgiving proclamation
has entered its third century. In
recent decades, it has become a lit¬
tle more ordinary, a little less stir¬
ring, a little less compelling. That
may have to do with the loss of reli¬
gious rhetoric, once a prized art; it
may also have to do with the
diminution—sometimes belittle-
ment—of eloquence generally. But,
taken together, the proclamations
make for a feast—of history, of the
presidency, of speech. And all who
dine there, do so with pleasure.
Jay Nordlinger
4 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
We Don't Need No
Flag Amendment
R ichard Parker’s piece in praise of
the flag-protection amendment
(“Old Glories in Tandem: Flag and
Constitution,” Nov. 13) is illustrative
of what is wrong with our modern
perceptions of self-government. In
his heralding of a “give the people
what they want” populism, Parker
would have us believe that the Con¬
stitution entrusts each of us to weigh
everything with calm, calculated, rea¬
soned thinking. Yet if history has
taught us anything, it is that men are
often overwhelmed by passion.
It is not that those opposed to the
flag-protection amendment fear an
“empowerment of ordinary people”
and their exercising of popular sover¬
eignty, as Parker contends. Those in
opposition do not think big-brother
government knows best, nor are they
fearful of Americans’ exercising their
right of popular sovereignty. But they
do fear the ever-increasing tendency
to govern from a base of clamorous
emotions and elevated passions.
The fact is that the Constitution is
full of “auxiliary precautions” to try
to prevent this kind of irresponsible
and unreflective practice from infect¬
ing the governing of our polity. Even
the most rudimentary reading of the
Federalist Papers indicates the Foun¬
ders’ fear of such a position.
In the event that these precautions
fail, as they appear to be doing in this
case, it falls upon responsible citizens
to elevate the debate above emotion
and passion. And while patriotism—
the issue at the core of the flag-pro¬
tection debate—is an emotional and
passionate thing, we ought not gov¬
ern from the gut. To do so is to prac¬
tice mobocracy.
Madison’s warning is clear. If we
fall into the well of governing by
polls and the loud, impassioned wails
of factions, whether they be minority
or majority, we will have subscribed
to “the indelible reproach of decree¬
ing to the same citizens, the hemlock
on one day, and statutes on the next.”
While flag burning may be a difficult
pill to swallow, it is hemlock that is
sure to kill you.
William Albert Smith
Washington, DC
A ll the impassioned debate over
amending the Constitution to
make flag desecration a crime could
be avoided by enacting some creative
state legislation.
One of my favorites was the legis¬
lation proposed in Tennessee and
Louisiana, which imposed a $5 fine
on anyone convicted of pounding
lumps on a flag burner.
For those offended by this
approach, I offered an alternative in
the Vermont Senate. My measure
proposed that the act of burning a
U.S. or Vermont flag constituted a
presumption that the perpetrator in¬
tended to relinquish any claim to
benefits from the respective govern¬
ment. If enacted by Congress, touch¬
ing a match to the flag would become
the equivalent of touching a match to
one’s food stamps, welfare payments,
Social Security benefits, Medicaid,
Medicare, VA pensions, etc.
This admirable approach was un¬
fortunately rejected by liberals hung
up on arguments about the First
Amendment, and conservatives
intent on lodging flag burners in jail
at public expense.
John McClaughry
Concord, VT
R ichard Parker’s article on the flag
burning amendment is a reminder
that democracy does not equal freedom.
Two hallmarks of a truly free democrat¬
ic society are the right not to vote and
the right to burn the flag. Both acts
make strong, important, and perfectly
appropriate political statements and do
not threaten a “populist” regime. The
legal system has far better things to do
than make a crime of flag burning.
Randy E. Barnett
Boston, MA
T he flag is our national symbol,
and no one should be permitted
to desecrate it. Richard Parker makes
a good case for a constitutional
amendment against desecration of
the flag, but I remain ambivalent. I
can see such an amendment provid¬
ing a life’s work for a whole genera¬
tion of activist lawyers. There would
be an endless series of test cases
working their way up through the
judicial system. The country needs
less litigation, not more.
Let us take the arguments of the
anti-amendment community. The
“thoughtful commentators” and
“opinion leaders” say that desecrat¬
ing the flag is a form of self-expres¬
sion and, as such, is protected by the
First Amendment. People who feel
the need to protest something or oth¬
er in this way should be free to do so.
Well and good.
There are other means of self-
expression. If someone who witnesses
a flag burning is offended and wishes
to do something painful to the burn¬
er, his actions should be equally pro¬
tected by the First Amendment.
Everything would be settled on the
spot. Both parties would be able to
freely express themselves. The flag
burner would get the media attention
that he sought, although not exactly
as he intended. There would be no
lawyers and no test cases.
W. T. Furgerson
Louisville, TN
Playing the Publicity Game
I n explaining how my law students
and I have been successful in
bringing legal actions against illegal
discrimination, pollution, and other
problems (“Banzhaf’s Game: How to
Give Lawyers a Bad Name,” Nov. 13),
Tucker Carlson professes to be
shocked to learn—and eager to
breathlessly report—that we issue
press releases. But even a fledgling
6 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
Correspondence
publication should realize by now
that this is the way most information
of potential public interest is sent to
the media, and that thousands of
individuals and organizations—yes,
even universities—issue press releas¬
es every day.
While my opponents frequently
purchase full-page newspaper ads or
employ large PR firms to get their
point across, I can do little more than
make information available to media
outlets. They, in turn, in the great
American tradition of the market¬
place of ideas, freely choose what
they feel will be of interest to their
own readers or viewers.
When newspapers like the Wash¬
ington Times or the Wall Street Journal
choose to report on my activities or
quote my comments, it is certainly
not because of any liberal bias on
their part.
Moreover, when, as the article
describes in great detail, newspapers
across the country quote me on a
wide variety of law-related topics, it is
not because my little fax machine
and I have bamboozled the national
media with press releases issued only
in the Washington area.
A far more likely explanation is
that, when they want legal informa¬
tion and insight in lay language from
knowledgeable sources not directly
connected with pending litigation or
representing some advocacy group,
newspapers tend to call law profes¬
sors like Alan Dershowitz, Arthur
Miller, A.E. Dick Howard, Paul
Rothstein, and, yes, John Banzhaf.
John F. Banzhaf, III
Washington, DC
No German Empire-Building
I rwin Stelzer’s article (“They’re Ba-
a-ack,” Oct. 9) has no reasonable
basis from which to criticize the cur¬
rent German economic policies with¬
in the European Union. That organi¬
zation is an entirely voluntary
alliance of sovereign, democratic
states.
Germany represents the largest
economic entity, but by no stretch is
it a domineering political influence.
Necessarily, German economic inter¬
ests and problems are strongly repre¬
sented in the multilateral bureaucrat¬
ic administration of the Union. How¬
ever, to liken the role of Germany in
the European Union to the attempted
formation of an “empire,” in a politi¬
cal sense, is clearly a misrepresenta¬
tion of the relations among the part¬
ners of the European Union.
Whether, or to what extent, a
nation should curtail domestic social
programs in order to deal with the
external competition in the labor
market is an issue that has no bearing
on a hypothetical “German Ques¬
tion” as theorized by Stelzer. Instead,
those are common problems con¬
fronting all nations that are striving
to maintain social stability and fiscal
balance while opening their economy
to free trade.
Ultimately, any lasting economic
cooperation among nations with
varying natural resources and differ¬
ent cultures will be a result of negoti¬
ation based on practical mutual bene¬
fit and the recognition of established
international relations among sover¬
eign states.
Ruprecht Schulte
Julian, CA
Justice Thomas, Victim?
T he opening lines of Justice
Thomas’s article (“The Benevo¬
lent State and the Need for Heroes,”
Oct. 23) and the closing lines (“keep
in mind that all of us are easily
tempted to think of ourselves as vic¬
tims”) are startling in their hypocrisy,
despite their truth.
Does Justice Thomas think we do
not remember his falling back on a
victim defense—being persecuted as
“an uppity black man,” I think were
his words—during his confirmation
hearings?
It is perhaps unrealistic to expect
him to acknowledge his use of that
tactic, but we could have then taken
his thesis more seriously and thought
better of him as exemplifying the
heroic virtues he says our culture dis¬
courages: “fortitude, character,
courage, a sense of self-worth.”
Richard Prince
Essex, CT
An Immigrant’s Education
A lbert Pyle (“The Next Million
Men: How to Save the Children,”
Oct. 23) advises parents, “No-non-
sense boot camp discipline is what
you have to keep in mind . . . That’s
the immigrant way.” Has Pyle ever
met any immigrants?
My own parents were Polish Jew¬
ish immigrants. Theirs was a typical
immigrant success story: They
worked hard, opened a business, and
succeeded. Their son liked school,
continued his education until he got
a Ph.D., and remained in school to
teach and study.
My parents were curious about the
world and its people, in all their com¬
plexity and variety. Somehow, they
must have conveyed to me their own
enthusiasm for study. Never once did
they say to “stay inside and crack the
books,” as Pyle advises. Instead, they
told me not to read too much. “Go
outside like a normal child,” they
said. “Reading will make you pale,
near-sighted, and hunchbacked.”
Education is neither punishment
nor a tool; it is an end in itself. Boot
camp discipline, on the other hand, is a
good way to make children think that
God’s universe is a dull and nasty place.
George Jochnowitz
Staten Island, NY
The Weekly Standard
welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length
and clarity and must include the writer’s name, address, and
phone number. All letters for publication should be addressed:
Correspondence Editor, The Weekly Standard,
1150 17th St., NW, Washington, DC 20036.
You may also fax letters to (202) 293-4901.
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 7
the weekly
Standard
Memo to GOP:
No Need to Panic
Y ou’re feeling sorry for the Republican congres¬
sional leadership, aren’t you? Last week they
rushed their beautiful football—the first legiti¬
mate budget-balancing plan in living memory—head¬
long into a few presidential vetoes. And it looks to you
like they got knocked on their cans. The government
“shutdown.” The Treasury Department was forced
into bookkeeping maneuvers to pay its bills and keep
entitlement money flowing. And Republicans, who
have been dominating 1995 politics to an extent that
makes them “responsible” for almost everything that
happens in Washington, took the blame in public
opinion polls.
The chickens are roosting. The conservative revo¬
lution is unpopular and sputtering. Right?
Nah. Save your pity. Congressional Democrats may
soon need it. The spending battle’s fundamental parti¬
san calculus hasn’t changed a bit. Presidential cam¬
paign politics still probably favor ultimate enactment
of a 1996 budget very much like the one Hill Republi¬
cans are insisting on. And despite the polls, the cur¬
rent “train wreck” could actually help achieve that
result.
Our “triangulating” president has, until recently at
least, talked a phony middle path between “the
extremes” of both congressional parties. He makes a
great, exaggerated show of defending his own pet ini¬
tiatives and decrying cuts in popular federal programs.
At the same time, he endorses the Republican bottom
line: fiscal balance through spending reductions, mid¬
dle-class tax relief, and welfare and Medicare reform.
In sum, Clinton betrays his party’s time-honored lib¬
eralism. It isn’t a winning platform anymore.
Had recent events not conspired to alter White
House rhetoric, then, the budget process would have
looked something like this:
The president would have signed a half-dozen or
so of the 13 appropriations bills that fund most federal
programs. He’d have first vetoed and then bargained
on a few others, the better to protect some random bil¬
lions. And one or two appropriations bills might yet be
unresolved, which would suspend some programs. But
not for long. Republicans do not care a whit about
most such programs, after all. Mr. Clinton’s leverage
there was always limited; time was a Republican
advantage.
Time was not a Republican advantage on taxes and
entitlements. Those programs never “shut down.”
Even the federal debt ceiling can’t stop them; the ceil¬
ing was reached last week—and promptly eluded by
government accountants, without so much as a burp
from Wall Street. So Medicare, the central controversy
here, was always going to be the last nut cracked. But
White House and Republican Medicare proposals are
not really all that far apart: $10 billion a year. However
this dispute might finally have been settled and spun,
we would have a Republican budget. And the Democ¬
ratic New Deal would be entering its coda.
There’s been a scheduling interruption, as you
know.
Congressional Republicans are behind in budget
legislation. When the government’s spending authori¬
ty lapsed at midnight Nov. 13 and the famous shut¬
down began, only three appropriations bills had been
signed into law. One other had been vetoed. Nine had¬
n’t been sent to the White House at all. By now, Presi¬
dent Clinton should be deeply implicated in domestic
spending cutbacks. But he isn’t. And his argument
against cutbacks generally has been strengthened as a
result.
Then, too, that argument is louder than it would
be had Clinton not committed a couple of amazing
gaffes: acknowledging in public that he thought his
1993 tax increase was too large, and phoning colum¬
nist Ben Wattenberg to endorse tougher welfare reform.
Those were two triangulations too many for embit¬
tered liberals in the president’s party. They finally
broke into open revolt, forcing him to tack sharply left
in his rhetoric.
And finally, there’ve been Republican debating
blunders. The president has been handed excuses to
oppose a balanced budget. Most notably, the GOP’s
vetoed stopgap spending measure contained an unnec¬
essary Medicare technicality that fairly begged for
presidential demagoguery. By the middle of last week,
after Speaker Gingrich let slip his annoyance over a
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 9
snub on Air Force One, Republicans were looking a
bit parochial and peevish, and their case for limited
government was obscured.
Now what? Is White House triangulation out the
window? Can the defense of the spending status quo
succeed? Is a genuine, seven-year balanced budget
dying?
Probably not. Don’t panic.
The last thing Bill Clinton wants to face in next
year’s campaign is the accusation that he blocked a
balanced budget to protect non-entitlement domestic
spending. An ABC News /Washington Post poll last
week showed almost half the country inclined to
blame Republicans for a government shutdown. The
same poll had more than half the country, a healthy 54-
40 majority, saying that bud¬
get balance was more impor¬
tant than maintaining current
levels of federal service. A zero
deficit in seven years, without
smoke and mirrors, is the
GOP’s one non-negotiable
demand. The president has
never rejected it. On Oct. 19,
in fact, he explicitly okayed it
in theory—provided, of
course, that it incorporates
assumptions about future eco¬
nomic performance that
would give him about $68 bil¬
lion more to spend each year.
He’ll never get it all. But
he doesn’t really need or want
it all, either. Even if Republi¬
cans conceded everything on
Medicare, again, it would
“only” cost $10 billion. And
the president’s very fondest
budget dreams involve just a
minuscule amount of additional cash. He wants to pre¬
serve his beloved AmeriCorps boondoggle. He wants
some more education, welfare, and environmental
money. Fine. Republicans should be careful not to go
overboard—baby steps in Clinton’s direction ought to
be enough—but a few billion here or there shouldn’t
be a deal-killer. Those concessions can always be with¬
drawn in future years. It’ll be something to look for¬
ward to.
Welfare reform? In his post-Wattenberg retreat, the
president has talked himself into a pretty tight box,
and he may now be forced to veto a bill that three
weeks ago he’d have loved to sign. In which case
Republicans might not even bother attempting an
override—so that their presidential nominee can
spend next year scoring Clinton for having blocked an
overwhelmingly popular, bipartisan initiative.
And the rest of domestic spending? Conventional
wisdom has it that the current shutdown makes the
entire Republican budget-cutting project appear ham-
fisted and “ideological.” Guess again. For example:
There are 11,900 HUD employees nationwide. Last
week, the Clinton administration itself declared 11,800
of them “non-essential” and sent them home. Details
like that—the shutdown puts a giant magnifying glass
on all of them—destroy the Democratic argument that
Republican proposals will cut government to the bone.
The shutdown has temporarily sliced far deeper into
the federal carcass than anything contemplated in the
Contract with America. And the worst of it seems to
be inconvenienced tourists and passport applicants.
By the time this magazine
reaches your hands, more
than a quarter of last week’s
800,000 furloughed federal
employees will have returned
to work, and all will get back
pay. Republicans will likely
be passing limited legislation
to reopen those few govern¬
ment offices that do matter to
the general public. And the
budget debate will have shift¬
ed back toward other discre¬
tionary programs, at HUD
and elsewhere, that . . . well,
have somehow never seemed
less necessary.
President Clinton, there¬
fore, may be tempted to drop
his current uncompromising
line much sooner than most
observers expect. His Repub¬
lican opponents have already
recovered their bearings. Gin¬
grich has them back on a strict balanced-budget mes¬
sage. And the president’s position will shortly devolve
to this: He will be attempting to preserve higher
spending levels for a series of federal programs on
which only a small minority of Americans depends—
by blocking all spending on those programs. It won’t
make sense.
Anything can happen, of course. Apparently favor¬
able instant polls are opium to a politician like Bill
Clinton. He may actually have started to believe his
own talking points. And the White House may yet
conclude that it can dig in its Old Democratic heels
and produce so much public disgust with gridlock that
a Perot-style independent candidacy will siphon cru¬
cial support away from the eventual Republican nomi¬
nee. But that’s a very big gamble. Campaign guru Dick
10 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
Morris’s New Democrat strategy is still much the safer
bet for Clinton. And the budget deal it requires—cos¬
metic, face-saving alterations to what will remain a
very conservative, very Republican plan—is still with¬
in reach.
So don’t be too quick with sympathy for Republi¬
cans. Think of the poor Democrats. Sure, they’re
momentarily gleeful in those minority caucus rooms
on Capitol Hill. But there’s a better than even chance
that liberalism is soon to suffer another triangulated
Clinton betrayal. And this one will be a whopper.
— David Tell, for the Editors
Shutdown I: Clinton
by Fred Barnes
P resident Clinton’s intuition was wrong. He
thought House Speaker Newt Gingrich would
go for a quick budget deal that averted a govern¬
ment shutdown. Still, when Gingrich proved unwill¬
ing to compromise, Clinton and his aides were ready.
For once, they had out-planned Gingrich. They put
congressional Republicans on defense. By early No¬
vember, the White House was preparing for a shut¬
down, developing themes (the GOP budget is “bad for
America”) and political tactics, and trying to create a
crisis atmosphere in which Gingrich would cave.
When Republicans proposed to raise Medicare premi¬
ums slightly, Clinton pounced. And when Gingrich
said he’d been snubbed on the Air Force One trip
from Israel after Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, the White
House reacted in mock disbelief at Gingrich’s gaffe,
then handed out photos showing Clinton had spent
time with Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Bob
Dole on the plane. Also, during the shutdown, Clinton
made sure he couldn’t be criticized for keeping the full
White House staff on the payroll. Only 90 of 400-plus
staffers stayed. Even Doug Sosnick, the White House
political director, was furloughed.
Good as his tactics were, the president made a mis¬
take: He overplayed his hand. It happened November
15, the third day of the shutdown, during Clinton’s
interview with CBS News anchor Dan Rather. He
vowed to veto a stripped-down Republican bill that
would resume government operations on the condi¬
tion that the president agree to balance the budget in
seven years and to use economic projections by the
non-partisan Congressional Budget Office as the basis
for doing so. Rather than sign this, Clinton said he’d
let the shutdown last “90 days, 120 days, 180 days . . .
right into the next election.” Why? Because the seven-
year/CBO requirement meant accepting the Republi¬
can budget with its deep cuts “in Medicare and Medic¬
aid, in education, in the environment, and a tax
increase on working people,” Clinton insisted. The
next day, he made things worse by failing to back off.
“I will still veto any bill that requires
crippling cuts in Medicare, weakens
the environment, reduces educational
opportunity, or raises taxes on work¬
ing families,” he declared.
The problem for Clinton is his argument isn’t true.
The seven-year/CBO requirement is a goal, not a man¬
date for particular cuts. It could be satisfied by tossing
out all the GOP spending cuts and substituting reduc¬
tions in Pentagon spending and changes in tax rates,
or by accepting some of the Republican cuts and
shrinking the size of the GOP’s proposed tax cut. It
could be satisfied an infinite number of ways. Clinton
all but conceded this point—unintentionally, I sus¬
pect—when he was asked on Nov. 16 why 48 House
Democrats had voted for the GOP measure. He said
they weren’t endorsing the Republican budget. They
have their own budget, with smaller spending cuts and
no tax cut. They wanted “to own up to the fact,” Clin¬
ton said, that their budget met the seven-year/CBO
standard. Well, if theirs did, so could others’. Republi¬
cans weren’t really imposing their budget priorities by
insisting on the seven-year/CBO requirement.
The upshot: Clinton had adopted an indefensible
position and declared himself inflexible. This was a
shift from a few days earlier when he harped on the
GOP scheme to boost Part B Medicare premiums from
$46 to $52 a month. Clinton’s rhetoric on this was cyn¬
ical (he favored a premium increase, too) and dema¬
gogic (“sharp hikes in Medicare premiums”). But at
least there was a factual basis for his claim. This wasn’t
the case once Republicans had jettisoned the Medicare
and other amendments and asked the president only
for a commitment to a balanced budget in seven years,
CBO-style. Clinton was unbending across the board.
When he met with Republican leaders on November
13, he brushed aside Gingrich’s suggestion that CBO
officials confer with White House experts over possi¬
ble adjustments in economic projections. And he later
rejected the idea of summoning Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan to mediate the dispute over
projections.
Clinton’s position may be unsustainable, but it
will serve his purposes for a while. There was method
in his madness. If an early deal with Gingrich on
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 11
favorable terms for Clinton wasn’t possible, the presi¬
dent was better off politically by prolonging the fight,
at least past December 15. That’s the filing date for
presidential candidates in New Hampshire. Clinton
wants desperately to avoid a primary challenger. An
early settlement on Gingrich’s terms might provoke
one. But dragging out a fight with Gingrich keeps the
president on good terms with the liberal base of his
party, indeed with practically all Democrats. As the
shutdown lingered, Clinton adviser George Steph-
anopoulos gushed that the president “received the
same standing ovation from the Democratic Leader¬
ship Council that he received from the Democratic
caucus in the House.” The one thing DLC and con¬
gressional Democrats agree on is hatred of Gingrich.
Clinton knows the acclaim, from liberals particu¬
larly, can’t last. He’s not looking for the struggle to end
the same way as the movie The American President,
which many at the White House saw. Stephanopoulos,
among others, helped director Rob Reiner, a Clinton
fan, on the film. In it, a slick, non-ideological presi¬
dent is transformed into a liberal crusader. The fic¬
tional president makes no deal with the devil. In real
life, though, Clinton wants a budget deal with Gin¬
grich. He wants to be able to claim, while running for
re-election next year, that he overcame gridlock and
cut taxes, cut spending, put the country on a credible
path to a balanced budget, saved Medicare, and
reformed welfare. Liberal Democrats won’t like the
accord Clinton ultimately reaches with Gingrich. But
Clinton will have thrilled them temporarily by touting
social spending programs and thwarting Gingrich.
Nothing delighted them more than Gingrich’s dis¬
comfort after making the childish complaint he’d been
treated rudely on Air Force One. Clinton didn’t set
Gingrich up for embarrassment, but it worked as if he
had. On the flight from Israel, Gingrich expected to
have budget discussions with the president. Mike
McCurry, the White House press secretary, had said
talks would occur on the flight home. Clinton was
ready to talk. But he’d been put off by a long chat with
Gingrich and Dole three days before the trip. “They’re
just dug in,” the president told an aide after that ses¬
sion. On the plane, he sent Leon Panetta, the White
House chief of staff, to check whether Gingrich and
Dole had softened their position. Panetta reported
back that they hadn’t. So Clinton slept, Gingrich
fumed, and the government shut down. ♦
Shutdown II: The Hill
by Matthew Rees
O n November 9, the Senate considered link¬
ing the abolition of the Commerce Depart¬
ment to a debt-limit extension soon to be sent
to the White House. A whip count showed that 14
GOP senators would oppose the measure, ensuring its
defeat. This infuriated a group of House GOP fresh¬
men, who marched over to lobby senators. The off¬
beat ploy not only failed (Republican senators had
never warmed to the idea of abolishing Commerce), it
also fomented the very disarray that Speaker Newt
Gingrich had been lecturing his House colleagues to
avoid. Then in private, Gingrich himself slipped: At a
leadership meeting on November 13, he complained
that senators didn’t want the government to close
because their visiting constituents wouldn’t be able to
go into the Washington Monument. Denny Hasten, a
deputy House Republican whip, was less discreet. He
told the Wall Street Journal, “The Republican senators
are irresponsible. They’ve got their heads in the sand.”
Meanwhile, conservative Republican staffers were pri¬
vately blaming obstinate House GOP freshmen for the
party being “off message.”
The divisions persist below the
surface, but the infighting subsided
as Republicans coalesced around
one idea. On November 16, they
announced that they would send
the president a continuing resolution with a single
condition: that Clinton agree to balance the budget
over seven years using Congressional Budget Office
assumptions. The beauty of this simple resolution,
Republicans reasoned, was that the promised veto
could mean only one thing: Bill Clinton wants to keep
government big, while Republicans want to shrink it.
By the end of the week, any talk of GOP compromise
on the seven years was heresy. Republicans had recog¬
nized what should have been self-evident a week earli¬
er: As Sen. John McCain put it, “If we can keep the
debate focused on a balanced budget, we’re going to
win.”
That focus was decided at the morning meeting of
the Speaker’s Administrative Group on November 13.
Gingrich, House majority leader Dick Armey, House
whip Tom Delay, and Gingrich loyalists Bill Paxon,
Bob Walker, and Hastert, were there, as well as senior
Senate aides Kyle McSlarrow and Dave Hoppe. They
could see that Republicans were getting slaughtered
by the White House for linking government funding
to an increase in Medicare premiums. They needed to
12 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
streamline their message. The group agreed to drop all
extraneous issues and mobilize around the clean, sim¬
ple theme of balancing the budget in seven years. Mis¬
sionary work followed, with staffers fanning out to
convey the new theme, and by November 14 nearly
every House and Senate Republican had embraced it.
GOP solidarity further crystallized after a presi¬
dential speech on November 14. That morning, Sen.
Pete Domenici and Rep. John Kasich, representing
Congress, and Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and Budget
Director Alice Rivlin, from the White House, met on
the sixth floor of the Dirksen building. Some GOP
senators feared that Domenici might repeat his perfor¬
mance from the 1990 budget summit, where he advo¬
cated tax hikes. The meeting modestly narrowed the
differences between the two sides and was mostly
good-natured (at one point, Domenici jokingly
referred to Clinton as “the Big Potato”). The two sides
agreed not to demagogue to the media, and Domenici
and Panetta kept the bargain, appearing together at a
press conference and describing their efforts as pro¬
ductive.
The goodwill, and any chance of a pre-emptive
surrender by Domenici, evaporated a few hours later.
Clinton’s speech blamed Congress for the government
shutdown and excoriated Republicans for “sharp hikes
in Medicare premiums and deep cuts in education and
the environment.” In the five-minute address, he man¬
aged to repeat this line of attack seven more times.
“That speech brought home the depth of the prob¬
lem,” said a Senate aide, who described Clinton’s
rhetoric as “mendacious.” Domenici captured the
mood change in an uncharacteristically livid state¬
ment shortly after the president spoke: “You stand
before the American people and fill the airwaves with
half-truths, absolute statements that are inconsistent
with anything that anybody else is saying.” When
Domenici, Kasich, Panetta, and Rivlin met that
evening in the Capitol, no progress was made and no
joint press conference was held. The stalemate pre¬
cluded meetings between the administration and Con¬
gress for the next two days. But the speech also unified
Republicans. “I think every time President Clinton
opens his mouth it brings Republicans together,” says
Hastert.
Yet GOP strategic unity did not resolve lesser leg¬
islative disputes. Republicans outside the leadership
spent much of the week ironing out their many differ¬
ences on appropriations bills. With the government
shut down, others didn’t have a lot to do. “I was
answering mail this morning,” said Mississippi sena¬
tor Thad Cochran at midweek. Cochran’s modesty
obscures the serious effort he was making to rally his
colleagues: Instead of getting bogged down in fights
over stopgap spending measures, Republicans should
be striving to complete their appropriations work
(only four of 13 appropriations bills had been enacted).
Cochran told me, Republicans “run the risk of spread¬
ing our net so wide that our achievement [balancing
the budget] will not be clearly appreciated.”
By the end of the week, the appropriations bills
were still unfinished, but the bigger news was that the
apocalyptic scenarios predicted by the White House
hadn’t come true. Default was not an immediate
threat, and the markets were humming (the Dow
Jones Industrial Average rose 50 points on the second
day the government was closed, and bond yields held
steady). The GOP’s arguments about the need for
smaller government were unexpectedly bolstered by
the White House Office of Management and Budget,
which announced that 99 percent of the workers at the
Department of Housing and Urban Development, and
89 percent of those at the Department of Education,
were non-essential. It didn’t hurt to have both Jay
Leno and David Letterman joke about the shutdown
being no big deal.
And, while Republicans were taking a drubbing in
the polls (a November 14 CNN/IASU Today poll found
the GOP blamed for the shutdown by a 49-26 margin),
they were still expecting their single-minded focus to
pay off. “We figure there’s light at the end of the tun¬
nel,” said Hastert, who by the middle of the week was
sounding much more conciliatory toward the Senate.
Smart move. ♦
I Made Hazel's Enemies List
by Irwin I. Stelzer
A t last. After missing my chance during the
Nixon years, I’ve finally gotten myself onto an
enemies list. True, this is a relatively trivial one,
consisting merely of journalists and “sources” who
have somehow antagonized
Secretary of Energy Hazel
O’Leary. But a “source”
has to take such crumbs of
hostile recognition as fall
from the table of the mighty.
And mighty Secretary O’Leary is. Her $18 billion
budget permits her to travel widely and in style, more
widely than the secretary of state, according to Democ-
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 13
ratic Sen. Harry Reid, and “with a larger entourage,”
in the words of the New York Times. And to hire con¬
sultants to identify anyone who sees in her the Peter
Principle at work. The geographic spread of her
empire permits her to threaten senators from New
Mexico (Sandia and Los Alamos National Laborato¬
ries), California (labs managed by the University of
California), and New York (Brookhaven National Lab¬
oratories on Long Island) with the economic devasta¬
tion of facilities’ closures if they trim her budget. And
the 100,000-plus contract workers beholden to the
Energy Department constitute a private army with a
strong incentive to protect her from budgetary harm.
But they apparently cannot shield her from the
adverse publicity that so nettles her. Or protect her
from the view of many reporters that she has a tenden¬
cy to substitute charm for
hard work. Or generate the
favorable publicity that her
PR. staff would garner by (as
they put it in a memorandum
leaked to the Washington
Times) emphasizing her “very
interesting persona” and
keeping her in the spotlight
“to the exlusion” of her staff:
“We need to abandon the
players in order to promote
the coach.”
All of this, of course, has
nothing to do with the real
issues that surfaced when the
Wall Street Journal revealed
that the Energy Department
had engaged consultants to
monitor the press and other
commentators, an exercise
that seems to this “enemy” quite a proper one for any
large organization that wants to know whether it is
getting its message across.
The first real issue is New Orleans, whence the sec¬
retary was forced to defend her department’s excursion
into media monitoring. Why New Orleans, the home
of mardi gras and jazz? Because that’s where Mrs.
O’Leary was when the story broke, on one of her
fabled trips, this one to “discuss aid to the oil and gas
industries.” So reports the New York Times , an organ so
appalled at the thought of having its reporters’ work
studied that it called for O’Leary’s resignation, some¬
thing the secretary’s botching of her job never
prompted it to do. In this age of budget stringency,
when the government is closed down because the pres¬
ident does not find it possible to cut costs sufficiently
to balance the budget by 2002, why is his energy secre¬
tary dashing off to New Orleans to find ways to give
money to the oil and gas industry? Answer: because
her department is in the habit of lavishing money on
energy producers. Its Office of Fossil Energy, in a con¬
tinuous hunt for what the department describes as
“innovations in [oil] exploration and production tech¬
nologies,” has spent $2.5 billion developing tech¬
niques for making coal more environmentally accept¬
able and for improving extraction techniques for nat¬
ural gas. Why the oil, coal, and natural gas industries
have insufficient means or incentives to engage in
such research is a mystery. As is the reason Energy
“continues to develop technologies in which the mar¬
ket clearly has no interest,” to borrow the words of a
recent Congressional Budget Office report.
Equally important is the self-condemnation con¬
tained in Mrs. O’Leary’s defense of her department’s
decision to spend $46,500 for
consultants to separate the
good media guys from the bad
ones. That sum, O’Leary
explains, is a pittance com¬
pared with what it would have
cost the taxpayers if the
department had undertaken
the chore itself—$170,000, or
three and one-half times as
much as the private-sector
consultants charged. Think of
it: The secretary of energy
defends her department by
proclaiming that it is only
one-third as efficient as the
private sector. Surely this is a
new highwater mark for can¬
dor on the part of a cabinet
officer. After all, the secretary
is inviting the conclusion that
we could save two-thirds of her budget, some $12 bil¬
lion per year, if her department would simply go away
and turn its work over to the private sector.
Of course, the Department of Energy won’t go
away. It spends too much money, in too many places—
most notably Senate Budget Committee chairman
Pete Domenici’s New Mexico—for Congress to dis¬
mantle it. This, despite the fact that authorities rang¬
ing from Vice President A1 Gore’s National Perfor¬
mance Review to the General Accounting Office, the
Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, and the Office of Technology
Assessment have repeatedly criticized the department
for its inability to meet its obligations with at least
minimal efficiency.
Take its weapons cleanup program, one that is con¬
tinually behind schedule and over budget. It is, said
Sen. J. Bennett Johnston early in O’Leary’s tenure, “a
14/ The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
grand and glorious mess. . . . No function of govern¬
ment has been as mismanaged as our waste cleanup.”
O’Leary has continued that tradition of mismanage¬
ment. Earlier this year the Senate Energy and Natural
Resources Committee charged that much of the mon¬
ey Energy spends at its largest cleanup site is being
“squandered .... There is almost no aspect of the
current approach that can withstand close scrutiny.”
All this adds up to an expensive mess. The Army
Corps of Engineers, after a detailed evaluation of
spending at the Department of Energy, found that its
costs were “higher than the amounts the Corps would
expect to pay for the same work by 42 percent.” A1
Gore’s review group agrees, but predictably stops short
of suggesting that the Energy Department be “rein¬
vented” out of business. After all, O’Leary agrees with
our very green vice president on the need to spend tax¬
payers’ money on energy sources dear to the hearts of
environmentalists, but so costly as to be of no interest
to producers or consumers.
Such a terminal “reinvention” wouldn’t make all of
the problems now in the Energy Department’s baili¬
wick, such as cleaning up nuclear waste, go away. But
it would get the government out of the energy busi¬
ness, put the research labs in the private sector, and
transfer responsibility for the cleanup job to a new,
more competent, pair of hands. And perhaps to some¬
one less concerned about image than about perfor¬
mance.
Irwin I. Stelzer last wrote about the British Labor and
Tory party conferences in The Weekly Standard.
PooR'Mouthing Uncle Sam
by James Higgins
A n unexpected player made a last-minute
entry into the federal budget debate on Novem¬
ber 10: The rating agency Standard & Poor’s
announced that investors’ faith in the U.S. govern¬
ment had already “diminished” because of the budget
deadlock and that, if the United States were any other
country, the agency would already have put it on
“Credit Watch” for a downgrade from triple-A.
While this made superficial sense, a closer analysis
reveals that Standard & Poor’s either had lost touch
with the meaning of creditworthiness or had entered a
partisan debate on the Democratic side, or both. There
are strong theoretical and historical reasons for dis¬
counting Standard & Poor’s comments.
First, it has never been clear what a credit rating is
supposed to mean when applied to the sovereign debt
a country issues in its own currency. A Standard &
Poor’s credit rating is supposed to evaluate a borrow¬
er’s ability to repay principal and interest. One of the
distinguishing characteristics of a sovereign borrower
is its ability to print money. While there may be some
doubt about the ability of, say, Mexico to repay its dol-
lar-denominated obligations, there should be no doubt
about the ability of Mexico to repay its peso-denominat¬
ed obligations. The same reasoning applies to dollar-
denominated U.S. debt.
One may object that printing money to repay
debts—literally monetizing the deficit—is inflationary
and should therefore result in a lowering of the sover¬
eign borrower’s credit rating. This is a fair objection;
but raising it must lead one to
ask why Standard & Poor’s
never threatened to down¬
grade U.S. government obliga¬
tions in the 1970s, when the
debt was being monetized aggressively and inflation
was spinning out of control.
Second, if Standard & Poor’s does not have a parti¬
san agenda, then it is hopelessly confused about the
difference between lack of solvency and lack of liquidity.
Solvency involves the wherewithal of the issuing enti¬
ty to pay principal and interest on its obligations:
Does the issuer have the resources—the assets or the
cash flows—to make the needed payments? There is
not the slightest doubt that the federal government,
the ultimate taxing authority in the land, has both the
resources and the willingness to assure payment of all
its obligations. Nor has there been the slightest con¬
sideration of repudiation of or compromise on any
portion of the federal debt. So the budget confronta¬
tion has had no impact whatsoever on the solvency of
the federal government. Liquidity involves the avail¬
ability of funds in the short run: Is there enough cash
in the till to pay the bills today, or will it be necessary
to wait until tomorrow, next week, or next month?
Standard & Poor’s intervention at this time neces¬
sarily implies a bizarre focus on liquidity and an utter
unconcern with solvency. All the emphasis is on the
ability of the government to pay bills this week versus
next week; no consideration is given to whether per¬
petual deficits will drive the government to ultimate
financial ruin. If these peculiar priorities are not actu¬
ally those held by Standard & Poor’s, why did the
agency never raise the slightest objection as presidents
proposed one budget after another projecting losses
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 15
(deficits) forever? This sudden obsession with liquidi¬
ty and simultaneous indifference to solvency smacks
of partisanship.
Third, there has been no indication that Standard
& Poor’s would actually be willing to follow through
on the implications of its ominous warning. If the
obligations of the U.S. government are downgraded,
what are the consequences for companies that hold
large quantities of U.S. obligations—bonds, notes,
bills, and cash? Has Standard & Poor’s come to terms
with the number of companies that would be candi¬
dates for downgrades if the U.S. obligations on their
balance sheets were deemed to be of diminished credit
quality? It would be rank hypocrisy to ignore this
implication of the downgrading of U.S. obligations
and cash.
Fourth, moving beyond theory, credit rating agen¬
cies do not have a stellar reputation for grasping the
“big picture.” Rating agencies do a reasonably effec¬
tive job of evaluating the relative financial strength of
companies within the same industry. If you want to
know which companies in an industry are more or less
likely to have financial problems in a prolonged down¬
turn, credit ratings are not a bad guide. But if you
want to understand whether the emperor is wearing
any clothes at all, don’t call Standard & Poor’s for help.
A recent and notable example: Japanese banks. By
1990 virtually every bond trader, salesman, and portfo¬
lio manager in the United States understood that the
Japanese banking system was a house of cards; that
purportedly ample capital ratios were built on ludi¬
crously inflated asset values. All the market partici¬
pants had gotten the joke, but the rating agencies
hadn’t. They were focused on nominal compliance
with Bank for International Settlements capital ratios
and other statistics that turned out to be irrelevant; so
they were still giving triple-A ratings to a number of
Japanese banks. The rating agencies apparently had
not a care or a clue about the business practices that
were leading these banks to hold at least $370 billion
of bad loans.
I particularly remember trying at that time, as a
mortgage trader, to sell one bond that was rated
triple-A by virtue of a supporting letter of credit issued
by the U.S. branch of a prominent Japanese bank. My
colleagues and I knew from the outset that the deal
would be a tough sell because of the undesirable letter
of credit. One sales call was to a prominent west coast
money manager. “In what trailer,” came the money
manager’s withering reply, “is that branch located?”
Other money managers were less caustic but equally—
and correctly—dismissive of the triple-A rating. So it’s
not particularly surprising that a rating agency that
didn’t understand what was financially wrong with
Japanese banks wouldn’t understand what’s financially
right about a serious effort to balance the federal bud¬
get.
Finally, one must note the similarity between Stan¬
dard & Poor’s pronouncement and Treasury Secretary
Rubin’s rhetoric. Even the New York Times observed
that Standard & Poor’s warning “almost exactly paral¬
lels warnings issued recently by Mr. Rubin.” Secretary
Rubin wasted no time showing up on the network talk
shows, waving Standard & Poor’s “objective” caution.
Coincidence? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Mr.
Rubin’s former firm, Goldman Sachs, must deal with
rating agencies every day. Perhaps Secretary Rubin’s
direct and indirect contacts at Standard & Poor’s
haven’t all disappeared. The secretary should be called
before Congress and asked under oath whether he
took any steps, direct or indirect, to encourage Stan¬
dard & Poor’s to issue this warning. Telephone records
should be subpoenaed if necessary. If it is established
that Secretary Rubin did encourage Standard & Poor’s
statement, he should pay the same penalty that any
other chief financial officer would pay if found encour¬
aging a negative rating-agency report on his employer:
He should be fired.
James Higgins has worked for eight years for primary
dealers in U.S. government securities, most of that time
trading securities rated by the major rating agencies.
Democratic Complex
by Andrew Ferguson
W elcome, my fellow Democrats!” hollered
Mayor Marion Barry. It was meant to be an
applause line, but the audience fell silent.
Several of them looked as though they didn’t want to
be on the same planet as Marion Barry, much less in
the same party.
Washington’s mayor forged
ahead anyway, welcoming last week’s
conference of the Democratic Lead¬
ership Council to the Washington
Convention Center. He shouldn’t have been surprised
by their “What do you mean we, Kemosabe” response.
DLC members are the New Democrats, seekers after
the Third Way, moving beyond the tired categories of
Left and Right. Barry is Mr. Old Democrat, the Tradi-
16 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
tional Liberal, a walking exemplar of the Worn-out
Bureaucratic Model.
But he’s learning, as a good host should. “Here in
the District,” the mayor went on, “we’re going to
transform our old-fashioned liberal government into
an enabling government—that’s the wave of the
future.” He paused again for applause that didn’t
come. “We’re very into self-help.”
Self-help\ You could almost feel the assembled New
Democrats cringe. Self-help is a simplistic term,
plucked from the rightward side of the old outmoded
liberal-conservative spectrum, and by tossing it out
this way the mayor merely confirmed his cluelessness.
As the New Democrats wrestle with the complexities
of the challenges of a new era, Barry remains mired in
an either/or dichotomy. It was, as one DLC member
told me, “paradoxical” that he
should appear at the start of
their annual convocation.
But no matter. For the
New Democrat, life is incredi¬
bly complex. Politics is
incredibly complex. New
Democrats are comfortable
with paradox, fluent in the
language of oxymoron. The
New Democrat spits out the
epithet “simplistic” as if it
were a chunk of gristle. Speak
of nuance and subtlety and a
smile of pleasure floats across
his face. Rise before a New
Democrat convocation and
call for a new politics that
moves us as a people and a
nation beyond the orthodoxies of the past, and you
will see members of the movement swoon into rapture.
Maybe swoon is too strong a word. So is rapture.
Come to think of it, so is movement. New Democrats
are earnest but not numerous. Founded 11 years ago
(by, among others, A1 Gore and Bill Clinton), the DLC
considered this year’s conference a landmark. Turnout
was nearly double last year’s showing. Hard on the
heels of the 1994 debacle, almost 1,500 Democrats reg¬
istered to attend—nearly one out of every 27,000
Democrats in America. But still.
“I’m here to get new ideas for my campaign,” said
Tracey Vance, an Iowan who plans to run for Congress
next year, and as he scurried from panel to plenary he
was not disappointed. Along with its affiliated think
tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, the DLC fairly
fibrillates with ideas. “Because Ideas Matter,” is the
council’s (mysterious) slogan. And where are ideas
found? In “The Idea Book,” a three-ring binder
issued to all particpants, stuffed with briefing papers,
mission statements, manifestoes, magazine articles,
and talking points—for New Democrats, a Thanksgiv¬
ing Day feast, served a week early.
The ideas are, as you’d expect, incredibly complex.
They contain more paradoxes than a book of koans.
They represent the Third Way: progressive and ambi¬
tious but not liberal, cautious and skeptical but not
conservative. The Democratic party’s problem,
according to the DLC diagnosis, is that, as the left-
leaning party in America’s two-party system, it leans
to the left. Why, they ask, doesn’t this bull have teats?
“The beginning of wisdom,” says PPI president
Will Marshall, “is to reject the either/or dichotomy.”
Thus: “The Gingrich revolution goes too far, but does¬
n’t go far enough.” New Democrats reject “the com¬
mand and control model” of regulation in favor of the
“opportunity and outcome”
model. Taxes? “Neither the
liberal nor conservative
approach meets the true goal
of tax reform.” Ditto health
care: “Traditional left-right
remedies sidestep the all-
important goal . . .” Job cre¬
ation: “Traditional liberal and
conservative answers are not
much help.” On the touchy
issue of teen pregnancy, poli¬
cymakers must “distinguish
between young teens” who
shouldn’t do it, and “older
teens” who will do it anyway
but should use a condom
when they do. New Democ¬
rats walk through gray areas,
swim in deep waters. This may be why there are so few
of them.
At first blush all this complexity could mean trou¬
ble for New candidates like Tracy Vance. Electoral
campaigns demand bright, bold colors; the DLC
offers a palette of pastels. Many participants I spoke
with described themselves therefore as “raging moder¬
ates” or members of the “radical middle”—currently
fashionable oxymorons meant to jazz up something
unexciting (moderation) by twinning it with a self¬
cancelling opposite. You might as well speak of a
“horny Pat Boone.”
It is difficult to see how the DLC agenda could sell
as a campaign platform. “Take the issue of regulation,
like OSHA,” Tracy Vance said. “I can tell voters that
we need devolution, to move power out of Washing¬
ton, down to the lowest possible level of government
decision-making.” But isn’t that what his Republican
opponent will be saying? “Oh no,” he said. “Because
New Democrats don’t see regulation as evil. These
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 17
radical Republicans do. We want devolution, and we
want national standards, too. The main thing is, peo¬
ple don’t want Washington telling them what to do.”
Or, as DLC talking points put it: We need “accountal
devolution” rather than “wholesale national divesti¬
ture.” This is how you get moderates raging.
Their protests to the contrary notwithstanding,
New Democrats remain Democrats first and foremost,
at least rhetorically. Every panel I saw over the two-
day DLC conference, every plenary, every speech,
offered ritual denunciations of Republican extremism,
harshness, cruelty, and intellectual poverty, even as the
speaker pushed an idea—say, market-based environ¬
mental regulation—conceived and advocated by
Republicans.
The “New” in New Democrat allows innumerable
strategic advantages like this. You can condemn pluto¬
crats and the bureaucrats who harass them. You can
advocate a massively expensive “Workers’ GI Bill” for
people who were never GIs. You can showcase Ameri-
corps, which pays kids to volunteer (talk about para¬
dox!). You can condemn the instrusiveness of govern¬
ment while finding new things for it to do. You can, in
short, have it both ways: PPI’s budget plan is called
“Cut and Invest.”
And best of all, you never have to become a Repub¬
lican, avoiding association with such vulgarians as
Helms, Buchanan, and Enid Waldholz’s husband.
Still, the DLC is a pretty thin reed from which to
build a movement. “I have seen the future of the
Democratic party,” DLC chairman Joe Lieberman
told the audience, “and it’s right here in this room.”
He meant it as a compliment, but he could be righter
than he knows. If they can’t do better than this, we
may indeed have seen the Democratic party of the
future: a roomful of 1,500 people. ♦
Why Newt Must Run
by Arianna Huffington
L ast week, Newt Gingrich spoke a few surpris¬
ing words—words that went astonishingly
unnoticed, given their ominous ring. “We may
lose next year,” he told the annual meeting of GOPAC,
the political-action committee he ran for nine years,
“but in 11 months, working as a team, we made the
tough decisions and laid our careers on the line.” Wait
a moment: lose next year? Was that Newt Gingrich,
the leader of the political realignment, slayer of the
New Deal, the most powerful congressional politician
since Henry Clay?
It was, and he was reflecting a mood that is spread¬
ing throughout Republican Washington. Losing the
budget battle, losing the White House, losing the
House—losses that would have been inconceivable a
few months ago, all of a sudden are part of the Repub¬
lican conversation.
The inconceivable could happen only because
most Republicans have been addressing the nation
more like accountants than leaders. Conversations
with your accountant are never something you look
forward to, even when the news is good. “Yes, we are
going to balance the budget in seven years, save the
Medicare trust fund, and cut billions of dollars from
federal programs,” the accountants say, but they offer
nothing to fulfill the public longing to live in a better
nation, one in which compassion and community are
at least as important as economic efficiency. To judge
from the latest polls, the nation seems
to be replying, “Fine, but the other
guys are going to do similar things,
and they have a bigger heart.” In a
recent CNN/Gallup poll, the president
is leading Republicans in public confidence by 48 per¬
cent to 42 percent.
What’s going on here? How can a president who
only last month backtracked on his proudest achieve¬
ment—the 1993 tax increase—and who is held in con¬
tempt by his own troops on the Hill have a 52 percent
approval rating? And how can the speaker of the
House, who has delivered on the legislative agenda of
the revolution more decisively than even his most
ardent supporters thought possible, have a 49 percent
negative rating? Most important, how can the revolu¬
tion move forward when Republicans have allowed its
opponents to define it?
There are those who believe that, given his com¬
bative nature, Gingrich might as well give up on per¬
sonal popularity, and that his best bet is to continue to
concentrate on maintaining the coalition on the Hill
and shepherding the legislative agenda. If the Republi¬
can nominee ends up being Bob Dole, they argue, and
if either Dole bests Clinton next November or Clinton
is reelected, Gingrich will continue moving the revo¬
lution forward as speaker of the House.
But where is it written in stone that Gingrich will
still be speaker in January 1997? The upcoming presi¬
dential race will be a referendum on the Republican
agenda. If the nominee turns out to be unable to artic¬
ulate the vision of the revolution, he will not only fail
to win the White House, he could drag others to defeat
18 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
with him—putting the House, and the revolution
itself, at risk.
If we are confident in the revolution, how can we
continue to sleepwalk through the nominating
process, and wake up, when it’s too late, with a nomi¬
nee using the megaphone of a presidential campaign
to explain to the nation a revolution he does not
understand? The prospect is as painful as hearing a
Schubert song warbled by Roseanne.
Running for president would undoubtedly be the
biggest gamble of Gingrich’s political career. And
there is absolutely no self-
interested reason for him to
do it. He has said that he
would run only if there were a
clear moral imperative for
him to do so. As he and his
wife contemplate the decision
over the Thanksgiving break,
here are not one but two
moral imperatives, and, for
good measure, a strategic
imperative as well.
The first moral imperative
was expressed by Gingrich in
his first speech as speaker:
“How can any American read
about an 11-year-old buried
with his teddy bear because he
killed a 14-year-old, and then
another 14-year-old killed
him, and not have some sense
of ‘My God, where has this
country gone?’ How can we
not decide that this is a moral
crisis equal to segregation,
equal to slavery, and how can
we not insist that every day we
take steps to do something?”
The Republican message so far has been expressed
not in terms of a moral crisis but in terms of dollars
and cents. The connection between balancing the bud¬
get and turning lives around has simply not been
made; neither has the connection between the level of
pain in America that Gingrich has spoken about and
the legislative agenda on the Hill.
Precisely because Gingrich is right about the moral
crisis the country is facing—millions of lives and
entire communities destroyed by drugs, alcohol,
gangs, and violence—there is a moral imperative for
him to fill the leadership vacuum and address the
growing devastation.
The second moral imperative was again identified
by the speaker in his speech on the night of the Mil¬
lion Man March: “I don’t think that any white conser¬
vative anywhere in America ought to look at Louis
Farrakhan and just condemn him, without asking
yourself where were you when the children died,
where were you when the schools failed, where were
you when they had no hope, and unless we’re prepared
to roll up our sleeves and we are prepared to reach out
and to say, ‘I’ll give you an alternative . . .’” There is a
moral imperative to articulate the alternative not every
now and then but with a sense of urgency, day in and
day out, in full-length speeches and in answers at press
conferences, on talk radio and on Oprah and on Live
•with Regis and Kathie Lee ,
until this becomes a revolu¬
tion with a human face and
Americans recognize it as
their own.
The presidential race
provides an ideal opportu¬
nity to use the bully pulpit
to paint vivid pictures of
how we will rebuild our
communities and renew
American civilization.
There is a moral imperative
not only to demonstrate
how rotten and full of holes
is the celebrated govern¬
ment safety net but to use
the spotlight of presidential
politics to become part of
the solution—to challenge
Americans to join in weav¬
ing a new and true safety
net out of their own actions
| and compassion, to make a
| lasting difference in their
s own communities.
Now the strategic
imperative for running. The
risks of doing nothing—of following the course of
least resistance—are always underestimated. Gingrich
today is not the Gingrich of January 1995. He is still
speaker of the House, but he is no longer Master of the
Universe, with a president who feels compelled to
remind the press corps that he is still relevant. And the
speakership is going to decrease further in value if the
message of the revolution continues to be communi¬
cated so poorly. While Gingrich is trapped in the role
of combative legislator, and there is no ideological
standard-bearer to rally 60 percent of the electorate
behind the agenda, both the leader of the revolution
and its legislative achievements will continue to lose
support.
Politics, like life, is paradoxical. And the same
strategic arguments that are used to dissuade Gingrich
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 19
from running for president—his duty to finish the job
on the Hill and his very high negatives—may be the
most compelling arguments in favor of his candidacy.
After all, the greatest obstacle to completing the job
will be public opinion, and the most direct way for
Gingrich to turn around both public opinion and his
numbers may be to delegate the daily combat on the
Hill to a team of his most able lieutenants and take the
message to the valleys.
Is it not worth the sacrifice if Gingrich can be lib¬
erated from his coalition-building job in the House to
build consensus in the country? And wouldn’t the
House freshmen be far more grateful to him if he
helped create a national climate that would make it
easier for them to defend their voting records when
they’re fighting for their seats next November?
Freshmen are looking carefully at the disappoint¬
ing results of the November 7 elections and are not
assuaged by the official GOP spin—that Republican
candidate Larry Forgy lost the governor’s race in Ken¬
tucky only because he failed to respond to personal
attacks by Paul Patton, his Democratic opponent. Don
Ringe, who was the media consultant on Forgy’s cam¬
paign and personally read over 4,000 responses to
nightly tracking polls, is convinced that the Patton
campaign’s attacks on the Republican agenda were
what really hurt Forgy. “Forgy’s unfavorables,” Ringe
told me “were exactly the same as his opponent’s right
up to election night—a relatively low 29 percent. It
was not until the Democrats began running ads hang¬
ing Gingrich and Medicare around our necks that our
numbers began to sink.” Come next fall, Dick Morris
will hang Gingrich and Medicare and school lunches
and tax cuts for the rich and a whole lot more around
the Republican candidates’ necks. Gingrich national¬
ized the election in ’94; Clinton will nationalize it in
’96.
But just as the Gingrich of November 1995 is dif¬
ferent from the one who assumed the speakership, so
too the Gingrich of November 1996 could be a far dif¬
ferent, far more inspiring public figure. Gingrich may
be a lightning rod, but he also embodies the revolution
like no one else. He is its most articulate, self-confi¬
dent, and unapologetic voice, and he burns with con¬
viction that America can and will be a better place
because of it. And if he’s sufficiently freed up from the
punishing legislative schedule of the last few months,
he can rediscover the youthful realization that drove
him to dedicate his life to politics in the first place:
that at certain critical moments in history, effective
leadership is all that stands between a civilization and
its collapse.
There are times in life when risking everything is
more prudent than protecting what you have. For Gin¬
grich, this could be one of them. And if Gingrich fails
to accept the mission, the mission does not go away.
The hole in the heart of the Republican revolution
remains, waiting for a leader to fill it.
Arianna Huffington is a senior fellow of the Progress and
Freedom Foundation, where she chairs its Center for
Effective Compassion.
Mediscare Tactics
by Christopher Caldwell
T he usual pattern is for Republicans to win a
squeaker election, while Democrats moan
about the dirty tactics used to pull it off. That
pattern was reversed with this November’s races,
when Democrats employed a campaign of “scare calls”
over Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to halt
Republican advances for the first time since 1992. The
same week, a scandal broke around Democratic cam¬
paign tactics, focusing Republican outrage on that pre¬
eminent moral preener, Florida governor Lawton
Chiles.
A lowdown election trick came back and bit Chiles
on the anniversary of his 63,000-vote win over Jeb
Bush in the closest governor’s race in Florida history.
Thanks to subpoena threats from Republican state
senator Charlie Crist, we now know the follow¬
ing: National Telecommunications Systems,
Inc. (NTS), a phone-bank company, made at
least 70,000 (and as many as 684,000) calls to
senior citizens in the last three days of the
November 1994 campaign. The cold-callers passed
themselves off as members of two groups: the Florida
Association of Senior Citizens (which is run by a Re¬
publican) and Citizens for Tax Fairness (which does
not exist). They told voters that (a) Bush’s running
mate favored eliminating Social Security, and (b) Jeb
Bush was a tax cheat. Neither was, strictly speaking,
true.
The Chiles campaign denied all knowledge of the
scheme until Crist’s subpoena loomed. Then cam¬
paign manager Jim Krog stepped up to take the fall.
But not really take the fall. As Chiles spokesman Ron
Sachs says, “Jim Krog acknowledged he made a bad
decision. He is one of the great political strategists in
the state.” (No argument there.) “And frankly, he’s the
20 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
Republicans’ worst nightmare.” In other words, he’s
staying.
So is Scott Falmlen, who served for five years as
vice president of the offending phone-bank company
before going into Florida politics in 1990. He has been
rewarded for his efforts on the Chiles campaign with
the executive directorship of the Florida Democratic
party. Says Sachs: “He’ll continue to serve as executive
director.” Even with the two most liberal newspapers
in the state—the Gainesville Sun and the St. Petersburg
Times —raining abuse on Chiles, the governor grudg¬
ingly apologized only on November 14. The message
of the non-firings and semi-apology is that this kind of
campaigning is okay with at least one of the Democra¬
tic party’s arbiters of what is in-bounds and what out.
Nor are Republicans above such wiles: Virginia’s
Joint Republican Caucus has owned up to mailing
6,000 postcards urging Democrats to vote for an inde¬
pendent assembly candidate, Donal Day, in order to
draw votes away from Democrat Emily Couric (Katie’s
sister), who won anyway. The
cards were mailed out under
the name of a group called
“Dems 4 Day” (a dead give¬
away: Only Republican
activists refer to Democrats as
“Dems”). In neither the
Florida nor the Virginia case
were laws violated. Florida
has no sponsor-identification
law. Virginia has one but it
wasn’t broken: Republicans
actually went to the trouble of
founding Dems 4 Day—it’s a
real organization.
Similarities between the
Florida scare calls and the
Medicare tactics used by
Democrats this fall only
heighten Republican fears that a new campaign style is
emerging nationally. In Kentucky, a wacky campaign-
finance reform that strangles candidates while allow¬
ing untrammeled “independent” expenditures may
have interacted with scare tactics in a way that led to
illegalities. The husband of a staffer for Republican
senator Mitch McConnell received two calls within
two minutes from near-identical numbers (606 491-
9533 and 606 491-9522). The first caller identified
himself as an AFL-CIO operative. The second claimed
to work in the office of Republican candidate Larry
Forgy and said, “We would like you to get out and vote
for our candidate. We think that he’s the biggest thief
ever.” The state’s Registry of Election Finance is
investigating.
Such attacks constitute the worst kind of dirty
campaigning. Yet Chiles spokesman Sachs is half right
when he says that they are part of the ordinary give-
and-take of politics. Republicans (and the Wall Street
Journal editorial page) have been too quick to use the
fraudulent conduct in Florida to besmirch all Democ¬
ratic rhetoric designed to scare the bejabers out of vot¬
ers over social-service cuts. True, some of these mes¬
sages bordered on the moronic: Kentucky voters were
warned that Republicans, in their zeal for privatiza¬
tion, wanted to “sell” the state’s lakes, as if someone
were going to load them onto cargo planes and ship
them to Japan. Virginia Republican activists piecing
together Democratic phone appeals say that one of the
Medicaid calls contained the line, “Republicans want
to take away your home . . . .” It’s a bit pathetic, as
Newt Gingrich, unsurprisingly, has remarked.
But it’s not a threat to civilization as we know it.
No one should confuse Chiles’s sleazy tactics with his
message—which may be sleazy, too, but is up to voters
to parse. It’s not illegitimate to “scare” senior citizens
about benefits, any more
than it’soff-limits to scare
city-dwellers about crime.
Certain Republicans seem
inclined to police such
Democratic “distortions”
as describing the slowing
of Medicare increases as
“cuts.” In fact, this is not
unlike the language Re¬
publicans used to rail
against tax “increases”
through bracket-creep in
the late 70s. The Democ¬
rats may be taking advan¬
tage of a tilted rhetorical
playing field on Medicare
and Social Security, but
it’s up to the Republicans
to even it out.
Republicans at the National Republican Senatorial
Committee are making sure a Florida-style phone
scheme doesn’t happen again. The committee’s execu¬
tive director, John Heubusch, favors an investigation
of several state races and has put Democrats on notice
that selected seniors’ homes in Oregon will be
equipped with call-tracing machinery during the mail-
in special elections to fill Bob Packwood’s open Senate
seat. That’s good. Such measures address the really
serious issues that have arisen out of Florida ’94 and
the recent elections. They should be sufficient to pre¬
vent a repeat of the con job in Florida last year, which
gave Chiles the governorship but cost him the thing
he always so self-righteously professed to care about
most. ♦
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 21
The coming of the
SUPER'PREDATORS
By John J. Dilulio, Jr.
L ynne Abraham doesn’t scare easily. Abraham is
the no-nonsense Democratic district attorney of
Philadelphia. The city’s late tough-cop mayor,
Frank Rizzo, baptized her “one tough cookie.” The
label stuck, and rightly so. Abraham has sent more
mafiosi to prison than Martin Scorcese, stood up (all
5'2" of her) to violent drug kingpins, won bipartisan
support in this Congress for wresting control of the
city’s jail system from
an ACLU-brand federal
judge, and, most recently,
publicly shamed the
know-nothing literati who
want to free convicted cop-
killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Today various of her col¬
leagues at the non-partisan
National District Attor¬
neys Association describe
her as “suite smart and
street smart,” “a genuine
law-and-order liberal,”
and “probably the best
big-city D.A. in the coun¬
try.”
All true. So pay atten¬
tion, because Lynne Abra¬
ham is scared.
In a recent interview, Abraham used such phrases
as “totally out of control” and “never seen anything
like it” to describe the rash of youth crime and vio¬
lence that has begun to sweep over the City of Brother¬
ly Love and other big cities. We’re not just talking
about teenagers, she stressed. We’re talking about boys
whose voices have yet to change. We’re talking about
Princeton’s ProfessorJohnJ. Dilulio, Jr. is director of the Brook¬
ings Institution’s Center for Public Management and Adjunct
Felbw at the Manhattan Institute. He is co-director of issues
research for the Foundation for the American Family, chaired by
former Pennsylvania Governor Robert P Casey.
elementary school youngsters who pack guns instead
of lunches. We’re talking about kids who have
absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of
the future. In short, we’re talking big trouble that
hasn’t yet begun to crest.
And make no mistake. While the trouble will be
greatest in black inner-city neighborhoods, other
places are also certain to have burgeoning youth-crime
problems that will spill
over into upscale central-
city districts, inner-ring
suburbs, and even the rur¬
al heartland. To under¬
score this point, Abraham
recounted a recent town-
hall meeting in a white
working-class section of
the city that has fallen on
hard times: “They’re
becoming afraid of their
own children. There were
some big beefy guys there,
too. And they’re asking
me what am / going to do
•| to control their children.”
« I interviewed Abra-
z ham, just as I have inter¬
viewed other justice-sys¬
tem officials and prison inmates, as a reality check on
the incredibly frightening picture that emerges from
recent academic research on youth crime and violence.
All of the research indicates that Americans are sitting
atop a demographic crime bomb. And all of those who
are closest to the problem hear the bomb ticking.
To cite just a few examples, following my May 1995
address to the district attorneys association, big-city
prosecutors inundated me with war stories about the
ever-growing numbers of hardened, remorseless juve¬
niles who were showing up in the system. “They kill
or maim on impulse, without any intelligible motive,”
said one. Likewise, a veteran beat policeman confided:
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 23
“I never used to be scared. Now I say a quick Hail
Mary every time I get a call at night involving juve¬
niles. I pray I go home in one piece to my own kids.”
On a recent visit to a New Jersey maximum-securi¬
ty prison, I spoke to a group of life-term inmates,
many of them black males from inner-city Newark
and Camden. In a
typical remark, one
prisoner fretted, “I
was a bad-ass street
gladiator, but these
kids are stone-cold
predators.” Like¬
wise, in his just-pub¬
lished book, Mans¬
field B. Frazier, a
five-time convicted
felon, writes of what
he calls “The Com¬
ing Menace”: “As
bad as conditions are in many of our nation’s ravaged
inner-city neighborhoods, in approximately five years
they are going to get worse, a lot worse.” Having done
time side-by-side with today’s young criminals in pris¬
ons and jails all across the country, he warns of a
“sharp, cataclysmic” increase in youth crime and vio¬
lence.
To add my own observations to this pile, since 1980
I’ve studied prisons and jails all across the country—
San Quentin, Leavenworth, Rikers Island. I’ve been
on the scene at prison murders and riots (and once was
almost killed inside a prison). Moreover, I grew up in a
pretty tough neighborhood and am built like an aging
linebacker. I will still waltz backwards, notebook in
hand and alone, into any adult maximum-security
cellblock full of killers, rapists, and muggers.
But a few years ago, I forswore research inside
juvenile lock-ups. The buzz of impulsive violence, the
vacant stares and smiles, and the remorseless eyes were
at once too frightening and too depressing (my God,
these are children !) for me to pretend to “study” them.
The numbers are as alarming as the anecdotes. At a
time when overall crime rates have been dropping,
youth crime rates, especially for crimes of violence,
have been soaring. Between 1985 and 1992, the rate at
which males ages 14 to 17 committed murder
increased by about 50 percent for whites and over 300
percent for blacks.
While it remains true that most violent youth
crime is committed by juveniles against juveniles, of
late young offenders have been committing more
homicides, robberies, and other crimes against adults.
There is even some evidence that juveniles are doing
homicidal violence in “wolf packs.” Indeed, a 1993
study found that juveniles committed about a third of
all homicides against strangers, often murdering their
victim in groups of two or more.
Violent youth crime, like all serious crime, is pre¬
dominantly intra- racial, not interracial. The surge in
violent youth crime has been most acute among black
inner-city males. In 1992, black males ages 16 to 19
experienced violent crime at nearly double the rate of
white males and were about twice as likely to be vio¬
lent crime victims as were black males in 1973. More¬
over, the violent crimes experienced by young black
males tended to be more serious than those experi¬
enced by young white males; for example, aggravated
assaults rather than simple assaults, and attacks
involving guns rather than weaponless violence.
The youth crime wave has reached horrific propor¬
tions from coast to coast. For example, in Philadel¬
phia, more than half of the 433 people murdered in
1994 were males between the ages of 16 and 31. All but
5 of the 89 victims under 20 were non-white. In Los
Angeles, there are now some 400 youth street gangs
organized mainly along racial and ethnic lines: 200
Latino, 150 black, the rest white or Asian. In 1994,
their known members alone committed 370 murders
and over 3,300 felony assaults.
But what is really frightening everyone from D.A.s
to demographers, old cops to old convicts, is not
what’s happening now but what’s just around the cor¬
ner—namely, a sharp increase in the number of super
crime-prone young males.
Nationally, there are now about 40 million chil¬
dren under the age of 10, the largest number in
decades. By simple math, in a decade today’s 4 to 7-
year-olds will become 14 to 17-year-olds. By 2005, the
number of males in this age group will have risen
about 25 percent overall and 50 percent for blacks.
T o some extent, it’s just that simple: More boys
begets more bad boys. But to really grasp why this
spike in the young male population means big trouble
ahead, you need to appreciate both the statistical evi¬
dence from a generation of birth-cohort studies and
related findings from recent street-level studies and
surveys.
The scientific kiddie-crime literature began with a
study of all 10,000 boys born in 1945 who lived in
Philadelphia between their tenth and eighteenth
birthdays. Over one-third had at least one recorded
arrest by the time they were 18. Most of the arrests
occurred when the boys were ages 15 to 17. Half of the
boys who were arrested were arrested more than once.
WHAT FRIGHTENS
EVERYONE IS NOT
WHAT'S HAPPENING
NOW; IT'S WHAT'S
JUST AROUND THE
CORNER—A SHARP
INCREASE IN YOUNG
PREDATORS
24 / The Weekly Standard
November 27, 1995
Once a boy had been arrested three times, the chances
that he would be arrested again were over 70 percent.
But the most famous finding of the study was that
6 percent of the boys committed five or more crimes
before they were 18, accounting for over half of all the
serious crimes, and about two-thirds of all the violent
crimes, committed by the entire cohort.
This “6 percent do 50 percent” statistic has been
replicated in a series of subsequent longitudinal stud¬
ies of Philadelphia and many other cities. It is on this
basis that James Q. Wilson and other leading crime
doctors can predict with confidence that the additional
500,000 boys who will be 14 to 17 years old in the year
2000 will mean at least 30,000 more murderers, rapists,
and muggers on the streets than we have today.
Likewise, it’s what enables California officials to
meaningfully predict that, as the state’s population of
11 to 17-year-olds grows
from 2.9 million in 1993
to 3.9 million in 2004, the
number of juvenile arrests
will increase nearly 30
percent.
But that’s only half the
story. The other half
begins with the less well-
known but equally impor¬
tant and well-replicated
finding that since the
studies began, each gener¬
ation of crime-prone boys
(the “6 percent”) has been
about three times as dan¬
gerous as the one before it.
For example, crime-prone
boys born in Philadelphia
in 1958 went on to com¬
mit about three times as
much serious crime per capita as their older cousins in
the class of’45. Thus, the difference between the juve¬
nile criminals of the 1950s and those of the 1970s and
80s was about the difference between the Sharks and
Jets of West Side Story fame and the Bloods and Crips
of Los Angeles County.
Still, demography is not fate and criminology is
not pure science. How can one be certain that the
demographic bulge of the next 10 years will unleash an
army of young male predatory street criminals who
will make even the leaders of the Bloods and Crips—
known as O.G.s, for “original gangsters”—look tame
by comparison?
The answer centers on a conservative theory of the
root causes of crime, one that is strongly supported by
all of the best science as well as the common sense of
the subject. Call it the theory of moral poverty.
Most Americans of every race, religion, socio-eco¬
nomic status, and demographic description grow up in
settings where they are taught right from wrong and
rewarded emotionally or spiritually (if not also or
always materially) for deferring immediate gratifica¬
tion and respecting others. Most of us were blessed to
be born to loving and responsible parents or
guardians. And most of us were lucky enough to have
other adults in our lives (teachers, coaches, clergy)
who reinforced the moral lessons that we learned at
home—don’t be selfish, care about others, plan for the
future, and so on.
But some Americans grow up in moral poverty.
Moral poverty is the poverty of being without loving,
capable, responsible adults who teach you right from
wrong. It is the poverty of
being without parents and
other authorities who
habituate you to feel joy at
others’ joy, pain at others’
pain, happiness when you
do right, remorse when
you do wrong. It is the
poverty of growing up in
the virtual absence of peo¬
ple who teach morality by
their own everyday exam¬
ple and who insist that
you follow suit.
In the extreme, moral
poverty is the poverty of
growing up surrounded
by deviant, delinquent,
and criminal adults in
abusive, violence-ridden,
fatherless, Godless, and
jobless settings. In sum, whatever their material cir¬
cumstances, kids of whatever race, creed, or color are
most likely to become criminally depraved when they
are morally deprived.
Most predatory street criminals—black and white,
adult and juvenile, past and present—have grown up
in abject moral poverty. But the Bloods and Crips were
so much more violent, on average, than their 50s coun¬
terparts, and the next class of juvenile offenders will be
even worse, because in recent decades each generation
of youth criminals in this country has grown up in
more extreme conditions of moral poverty than the
one before it.
The abject moral poverty that creates super-preda¬
tors begins very early in life in homes where uncondi-
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 25
tional love is nowhere but unmerciful abuse is com¬
mon. One of the best ethnographic accounts of this
reality is Mark S. Fleisher’s 1995 book on the lives of
194 West Coast urban street criminals, including sev¬
eral dozen who were juveniles at the time he did his
primary field research (1988 to 1990). Almost without
exception, the boys’ families “were a social fabric of
fragile and undependable social ties that weakly bound
children to their parents and other socializes.” Nearly
all parents abused alcohol or drugs or both. Most had
no father in the home; many had fathers who were
criminals. Parents “beat their sons and daughters—
whipped them with belts,
punched them with fists,
slapped them, and kicked
them.”
Such ethnographic
evidence is mirrored by
national statistics on the
morally impoverished be¬
ginnings of incarcerated
populations. For example,
75 percent of highly vio¬
lent juvenile criminals
suffered serious abuse by a
family member; nearly 80
percent witnessed extreme
violence (beatings, kill¬
ings); over half of prison¬
ers come from single-par¬
ent families; over one-
quarter have parents who
abused drugs or alcohol; nearly a third have a brother
with a prison or jail record.
Among other puzzles, the moral poverty theory
explains why, despite living in desperate economic
poverty, under the heavy weight of Jim Crow, and with
plenty of free access to guns, the churchgoing, two-
parent black families of the South never experienced
anything remotely like the tragic levels of homicidal
youth and gang violence that plague some of today’s
black inner-city neighborhoods.
It also explains why once relatively crime-free
white working-class neighborhoods are evolving into
white underclass neighborhoods. The out-migration
of middle-class types, divorce, out-of-wedlock births,
and graffiti-splattered churches have spawned totally
unsocialized young white males who commit violent
crimes and youth gangs that prefer murder to mis¬
chief. (Anyone who doubts it is welcome to tour my
old Catholic blue-collar neighborhood in Philadel¬
phia.)
Moral poverty begets juvenile super-predators
whose behavior is driven by two profound develop¬
mental defects. First, they are radically present-orient¬
ed. Not only do they perceive no relationship between
doing right (or wrong) now and being rewarded (or
punished) for it later. They live entirely in and for the
present moment; they quite literally have no concept
of the future. As several researchers have found, ask a
group of today’s young big-city murderers for their
thoughts about “the future,” and many of them will
ask you for an explanation of the question.
Second, the super-predators are radically self-
regarding. They regret getting caught. For themselves,
they prefer pleasure and
freedom to incarceration
and death. Under some
conditions, they are affec¬
tionate and loyal to fellow
gang members or rela¬
tives, but not even moms
or grandmoms are sacred
to them; as one prisoner
quipped, “crack killed
everybody’s ‘mama.’”
And they place zero value
on the lives of their vic¬
tims, whom they reflex-
ively dehumanize as just
so much worthless “white
g. trash” if white, or by the
| usual racial or ethnic epi-
| thets if black or Latino.
On the horizon, there¬
fore, are tens of thousands of severely morally impov¬
erished juvenile super-predators. They are perfectly
capable of committing the most heinous acts of physi¬
cal violence for the most trivial reasons (for example, a
perception of slight disrespect or the accident of being
in their path). They fear neither the stigma of arrest
nor the pain of imprisonment. They live by the mean¬
est code of the meanest streets, a code that reinforces
rather than restrains their violent, hair-trigger mental¬
ity. In prison or out, the things that super-predators
get by their criminal behavior—sex, drugs, money—
are their own immediate rewards. Nothing else mat¬
ters to them. So for as long as their youthful energies
hold out, they will do what comes “naturally”: mur¬
der, rape, rob, assault, burglarize, deal deadly drugs,
and get high.
What is to be done? I will conclude with one big
idea, but my best advice is not to look for serious
answers from either crowd in Washington.
Earlier this year, I was among a dozen guests invit¬
ed to a working White House dinner on juvenile
26 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
crime. Over gourmet Szechwan wonton and lamb, the
meeting dragged on for three-and-a-half hours. Presi¬
dent Clinton took copious notes and asked lots of
questions, but nothing was accomplished. One guest
pleaded with him to declare a National Ceasefire Day.
Wisely, he let that one pass. But another guest recom¬
mended that he form (you guessed it) a commission.
In mid-July, the president named six members to a
National Commission on Crime Control and Preven¬
tion. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Meanwhile, Republicans have made some real
improvements on the 1994 crime bill. But it is hard to
imagine that block-granting anti-crime dollars will
work (it never has before). And it is easy to see how the
passion for devolution is driving conservatives to con¬
tradict themselves. For years they’ve stressed that
drugs, crime, and welfare dependency are cultural and
moral problems. Now, however, they talk as if perverse
monetary incentives explained everything.
True, government policies helped wreck the two-
parent family and disrupted other aspects of civil soci¬
ety. But how does the sudden withdrawal of govern¬
ment lead automatically to a rebirth of civil society, an
end to moral poverty, and a check on youth crime? It
doesn’t, not any more than pulling a knife from the
chest of a dead man brings him dancing back to life.
Liberal social engineering was bad; conservative social
re-engineering will prove worse.
My one big idea is borrowed from three well-
known child-development experts—Moses, Jesus
Christ, and Mohammed. It’s called religion. If we are
to have a prayer of stopping any significant fraction of
the super-predators short of the prison gates, then we
had better say “Amen,” and fast.
W hy religion? Two reasons. First, a growing body
of scientific evidence from a variety of academic
disciplines indicates that churches can help cure or
curtail many severe socioeconomic ills. For example, a
1986 study by Harvard economist Richard Freeman
found that among black urban youth, church atten¬
dance was a better predictor of who would escape
drugs, crime, and poverty than any other single vari¬
able (income, family structure) and that churchgoing
youth were more likely than otherwise comparable
youth to behave in socially constructive ways. Like¬
wise, a study by a panel of leading specialists just pub¬
lished by the journal Criminology concluded that, while
much work remains to be done, there is substantial
empirical evidence that religion serves “as an insulator
against crime and delinquency.” And we have long
known that many of the most effective substance-
abuse prevention and treatment programs, both in
society and behind bars, are either explicitly religious
or quasi-religious in their orientation.
Second, religion is the one answer offered time and
again by the justice-system veterans, prisoners, and
others I’ve consulted. With particular reference to
black youth crime, for example, it is an answer prof¬
fered in recent books by everyone from liberal Cornel
West to neoconservative Glenn Loury, Democrat Jesse
Jackson to Republican Alan Keyes.
In a recent forum at Trenton’s Mount Zion AME
Church, Isaac “Ike” Ballard, executive director of edu¬
cation for the New Jersey prison system, spoke the big
truth: “The church is the most potent establishment
in every black community. It is the single entity that
can take on the mission of economic development and
give people, especially young people, an alternative to
drugs and crime.” To be sure, black churches are in
decline in many needy neighborhoods. They are
straining to stay open despite lost membership, near-
empty coffers, and increasing community demands.
Still, they remain the last best hope for rebuilding the
social and spiritual capital of inner-city America.
We must, therefore, be willing to use public funds
to empower local religious institutions to act as safe
havens for at-risk children (church-run orphanages,
boarding schools, call them what you please), provide
adoption out-placement services, administer govern¬
ment-funded “par¬
enting skills” classes,
handle the youngest
non-violent juvenile
offenders, provide
substance-abuse
treatment, run day¬
care and pre-school
programs, and per¬
form other vital
social and economic
development func¬
tions.
Although many government officials are reluctant
to admit it—and while data on how much of each gov¬
ernment social-services dollar already goes through
religious institutions are incredibly sparse—in some
places churches are already performing such tasks
with direct or indirect public support. We should
enable them to do even more.
Obviously, even with increased public support,
churches could not come close to saving every child or
solving every social problem. But I’d bet that the mar¬
ginal return on public investments that strengthen the
community-rebuilding and child-protection capacities
MY ONE BIG IDEA IS
BORROWED FROM
THREE WELL-
KNOWN CHILD-
DEVELOPMENT
EXPERTS—MOSES,
JESUS CHRIST, AND
MOHAMMED.
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 27
of local churches would equal or exceed that of the
marginal tax dollar spent on more cops, more public
schools, and more prisons.
Such proposals raise all sorts of elite hackles. But
most Americans believe in God (90 percent) and pray
each day (80 percent). The trouble is that our faith in
God and religion is not reflected in federal, state, and
local social policies, courtesy of the anti-religious and
non-religious liberal and conservative pseudo-sophis¬
ticates of both parties. Let them argue church-state
issues (anyone remember the Northwest Ordinance or
what the Founding Fathers really said about religion?)
all the way to the next funeral of an innocent kid
caught in the crossfire. Let these theoretic politicians,
as Madison would disparagingly call them, trifle with
non-issues concerning which level of government
ought to take the lead in protecting lives and property.
(Answer: all.)
No one in academia is a bigger fan of incarceration
than I am. Between 1985 and 1991 the number of juve¬
niles in custody increased from 49,000 to nearly
58,000. By my estimate, we will probably need to
incarcerate at least 150,000 juvenile criminals in the
years just ahead. In deference to public safety, we will
have little choice but to pursue genuine get-tough law-
enforcement strategies against the super-predators.
But some of these children are now still in diapers,
and they can be saved. So let our guiding principle be,
“Build churches, not jails”—or we will reap the whirl¬
wind of our own moral bankruptcy. ♦
The Case for an
Americ an 'Frank pledge*
By Andrew Peyton Thomas
I n recent years, the alarming increase in violent
crime rates has proved resistant to the best efforts
of police and politicians. These trends have also
given us reason to reconsider the tried and true crime-
control strategies that once kept American streets safe.
In particular, it is time that American tax policies
begin to reflect the age-old presumption that private
citizens, rather than the government, are primarily
responsible for the defense of their neighborhoods
from criminals.
Accordingly, the federal government should offer a
tax credit or some other comparable financial incen¬
tive for Americans to participate in Neighborhood
Watch programs or similar community crime-control
organizations. By giving each participating household
a credit of, say, $250 a year, the federal government
could do far more to deter crime than spending the
same amount for more police officers and prisons.
To receive this tax benefit, citizens would be
required to patrol their neighborhoods without
weapons, armed only with walkie-talkies and other
Andrew Peyton Thomas is an assistant attorney general for Ari¬
zona and the author of the book Crime and the Sacking of
America: The Roots of Chaos. This article does not necessar¬
ily reflect the views of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
communications gear capable of informing police of
any criminal activity discovered. Their sole duty
would be to inform police of crimes in progress.
Such a system would not be some untested anti¬
crime proposal born of frustration with the current
crime problem. It is, rather, a return to the system of
community self-protection that the Founding Fathers
inherited from Great Britain. Under the system called
the “frankpledge,” men without property were orga¬
nized for community self-defense and required to
serve as night watchmen. This arrangement served for
centuries as an effective deterrent to crime. It was not
abandoned until the 1800s, when Americans became
confident that the new police departments being creat¬
ed could singlehandedly deter crime.
By offering tax credits for community crime-con¬
trol service, the government would not be making
such service mandatory. This is an important distinc¬
tion from the classic frankpledge and is more consis¬
tent with the ethos of our time. Rather, the American
frankpledge would enlist volunteers for defense of
their own territory, modestly compensating them and
thereby demonstrating government’s support for this
indispensable service.
It would also be a better investment of federal
money than simply sending more funds to police
28 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
departments. While policemen cannot be everywhere
at once, neighbors, in a sense, can. Now, the probabili¬
ty of arrest for a crime in progress is about 33 percent,
while a mere 15-minute delay in giving chase reduces
the probability to 5 percent. One prominent criminol¬
ogist, Herman Goldstein, has estimated convincingly
that a 5 to 10 percent increase in cit¬
izen anti-crime involvement could
“possibly prove of much greater val¬
ue in combating crime than a 50 to
60 percent increase in the number
of police officers or an equally large
investment in technical equip¬
ment.”
An example of the kind of dra¬
matic success to be reaped from
such widespread citizen involve¬
ment was evident recently in
Detroit’s reaction to the annual
real-life Halloween horror of Dev¬
il’s Night. In response to the local
tradition of an arson festival on the nights preceding
All Hallows Eve, Detroit residents in 1991 banded
together with fire extinguishers, flashlights, and radios
in a massive display of community deterrence.
With the help of police helicopters and a dusk-to-
dawn juvenile curfew, the 4,000 volunteers cut the
number of fires from 141 the prior year to 62. In the
following years, there was less community involve¬
ment and more fires, thus proving the reverse point as
well.
Active governmental support of such community
efforts is crucial. There is only so much that private
citizens can do without a coordinated governmental
strategy for fighting crime, one that
issues a common call to civic duty
supported by proper financial incen¬
tives. We must recognize that our
duty to defend the community
against criminals does not end when
we pay our taxes to fund police
squads. Ultimately, the people must
be willing to roll up their sleeves
and help out more actively.
As crime rates continue to rise
ominously among juveniles, espe-
■qq
g dally white juveniles (among whom
1 crime rates are rising at more than
double the rate of growth among
black juveniles), we must all be prepared to assist our
beleaguered police forces in the daunting task at hand.
Tax incentives for community anti-crime service are a
sensible place to start. For without the help of the cur¬
rently disengaged masses, America’s police officers
will continue to languish in a siege that promises to
end unpleasantly. ♦
Why We Should
Decrim inaliz e Crime
By William Tucker
T he same week that O.J. Simpson got off, the
U.S. Supreme Court was considering Gore v.
BMW, the case of an Alabama doctor who
found that his car had been partially refinished after
suffering slight damage on the boat trip from Ger¬
many. An Alabama jury awarded $4,000 in compen¬
satory damages and $4 million in punitive damages.
The juxtaposition illustrates perfectly the yawning
dichotomy that has developed between the two halves
of the justice system. On the criminal side, it seems
William Tucker is a free-lance writer living in Brooklyn. He col¬
laborated with Newt Gingrich on To Renew America.
impossible to convict anybody of anything. Certainly,
the jails are filled with offenders. But when really
important cases arise and the criminal defense indus¬
try marshals its forces, it seems less and less likely that
the prosecution will secure a conviction—or, equally
important, make one stick in the appeals process. Next
thing you know, it is being argued that the system is
“unfair” because every criminal does not get the same
kind of legal defense.
The degeneration of race relations in Los Angeles
and across the country, for example, has been charted
by a series of bizarre acquittals in what seemed to be
transparent cases of guilt. First there was the acquittal
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 29
of five Los Angeles police officers in the beating of
Rodney King. (The subsequent conviction of two of
them on federal charges, a blatant violation of double
jeopardy, has done little to mend the damage.) Then
there was the acquittal of two black rioters, on charges
of attempted murder and felonious assault, for pulver¬
izing a truck driver on national television. (One defen¬
dant is serving 10 years for felonious mayhem.) Finally
there was O.J. Throughout, there has been the running
sore of the inability to secure a conviction of the
Menendez brothers, who have admitted to killing both
their parents with repeated blasts from a shotgun.
On the civil side of the bench, on the other hand,
everybody seems guilty of everything. McDonald’s
must pay millions because somebody spilled a cup of
their coffee. Parents pay damages because they took
part in assembling a nursery-school jungle gym. Bur¬
glars win judgments against property owners for
injuries incurred while breaking into the premises.
“Punitive damages” in these suits are so bizarre that
they would easily be recognized as “cruel and unusual
punishment” were they being administered on the
criminal side. As O.J. Simpson is about to find out, the
civil courts—supposedly set up to resolve disputes—
have in effect become more a forum for administering
punishment than the criminal courts themselves.
How has this come about? Most significant is the
huge gulf in procedural matters that has opened
between the criminal and civil divisions since the era
of the New Deal. At one time, the criminal and civil
systems were governed by recognizably similar princi¬
ples. The burden of proof has always been different.
Civil cases are decided by the “preponderance of evi¬
dence,” while criminal charges must be proved
“beyond a reasonable doubt.” But the procedures by
which evidence was brought into the courtroom were
at least somewhat the same.
Today, criminal and civil procedures might easily
be mistaken for the justice systems in two different
countries. On the criminal side, police and prosecutors
are so hemmed in by procedural rules that “putting
the prosecution on trial” is the standard method of
criminal defense. Any peccadillo in evidence gather¬
ing immediately becomes the central issue of the trial.
These “violations of the defendant’s rights” are treated
on a par with whatever murder or mayhem the defen¬
dant is accused of. As Justice Benjamin Cardozo put it,
“The criminal goes free because the constable has
blundered.”
On the civil side, there are no such restrictions.
Plaintiff attorneys have been given such enormous
powers of search and seizure that they regularly refer
to themselves as “private attorneys general,” scouring
the countryside, rooting through people’s private lives
and personal papers in search of real or imagined
wrongdoing. Far from filtering evidence, many states
have adopted an attitude of “let it all in,” no matter
how peculiar or irrelevant it may be. (The recent
Daubert decision in the U.S. Supreme Court has set a
higher standard at the federal level, but this is not
binding on states.)
T he most obvious place where the two systems have
diverged is in the area of personal interrogation.
The 1966 Miranda decision has made it extremely dif¬
ficult to obtain criminal confessions—or even to elicit
denials and alibis that might otherwise be disproved.
A suspect must be so persistently advised of his right
to retain an attorney that if he does not take advantage,
the warning itself may be judged insufficient. Once an
attorney arrives, however, he will not allow the suspect
to confess or even respond to police interrogation. If
he does, he risks giving “incompetent counsel.”
Criminals still confess, but these confessions are
often suppressed on the grounds that they have been
“coerced.” In fact, many civil liberties attorneys argue
that there is no such thing as an uncoerced confession.
Why would a suspect incriminate himself, except if he
has been forced to or tricked by the police?
30 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
On the civil side, on the other hand, private attor¬
neys have been given wide latitude to extract personal
testimony from defendants without the supervision of
the court. “Depositions”—once limited to deathbed
testimony and other situations where a witness could
not appear in court—have been expanded to give pri¬
vate attorneys the right to interrogate anybody, any
time, on any matter remotely relating to a case. If your
spouse sues for divorce, you can be interrogated by his
or her attorney about your personal and sex life and
subject to charges of perjury or contempt of court for
your answers. There is no “right to remain silent.”
Wal-Mart was once fined $11 million because its late
founder, Sam Walton, failed to show up for a couple of
depositions in a case where someone had slipped and
fallen in one of the company’s stores.
The same divergence has occurred in the area of
physical evidence. Since the 1961 Mapp case, criminal
cases have been subject to the “exclusionary rule,”
which says that evidence can be withheld from the
jury if constitutional procedures are violated in gather¬
ing it. These procedures are subject to endless hair¬
splitting and will almost certainly never be resolved.
The evidence gathered from O.J. Simpson’s mansion,
for example, was supposedly “tainted” because police
entered without a warrant. But what if they had
obtained a warrant? According to the Fourth Amend¬
ment, a warrant must describe “the place to be
searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The
courts have often interpreted this to mean that if the
warrant does not specifically say “socks” or “glove,”
such discoveries are inadmissible. On the other hand,
warrants have also been held unconstitutional because
they were “overbroad” and described too many things.
A few years ago, the Supreme Court decided the police
had violated a burglar’s Fourth Amendment rights
because, after legally entering his apartment in search
of drugs, they turned a television set in order to read
the serial number and determine if it is was stolen (it
was). Turning the television set, the court said, exceed¬
ed the scope of the legal search.
O n the civil side, once again, things have gone in
the opposite direction. Fifty years ago, in order
to obtain evidence in a civil suit, plaintiffs had to bring
specific charges and list specific information that they
sought, much as is done in issuing criminal search
warrants. Today, “discovery” proceedings have been so
vastly expanded that plaintiff attorneys can claim
access to virtually any corporate record or personal
paper. Plaintiffs routinely write up scattergun com¬
plaints and demand information by the truckload.
Charges are then constructed after the fact. Defen¬
dants can be punished for withholding information—
a standard definitely not applied to criminal defen¬
dants, even though the penalties in civil cases are often
much more severe.
In criminal cases, laws against hearsay evidence
have been tightened. In civil proceedings, they have
been loosened. In the criminal cases, forensic DNA
identification is still excluded in several states. In the
civil courts, DNA identification is standard procedure
in paternity cases. While criminal courts have gagged
on DNA evidence—now supported by the entire sci¬
entific community—the civil courts have swallowed
every sort of “junk science,” from “loss of psychic
powers” to the “trauma theory of cancer,” which says
you can get cancer from being hit on the head with an
orange-juice bottle.
How did the two systems come to divide so
remarkably? It is almost impossible to look at the situ¬
ation without confronting the personal and financial
interests of the lawyers themselves. Quite simply, the
defense of criminals has become a very lucrative pro¬
fession. There is a vast drug industry, as well as orga¬
nized-crime and white-collar offenders, all ready and
willing to shell out enormous amounts for legal repre¬
sentation. O.J. and Claus von Billow are only the tip of
the iceberg.
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 31
On the civil side, it is the plaintiff’s attorneys who
are the high rollers, collecting between one-third and
half of nearly every class-action award and punitive-
damage fee. Coincidentally—suspiciously, even—the
law on both sides of the courthouse has steadily
evolved in favor of the big-money players of the legal
profession.
Let’s start with criminal justice. The system is
based on the underlying theory that the state itself—
and not the victim of the crime—is the offended party.
At one time, this was crucial in putting the “awesome
powers of the state” on the side of innocent victims. In
practice, however, it has come to mean that the prose¬
cution of crime is a state monopoly, while defending
criminals is a vigorously pursued private enterprise.
It’s a bit like pitting the post office against the comput¬
er industry.
One unfortunate outcome is that prosecutors don’t
make much money. A handful around the country
may have an income in the low six figures, but most
are distinctly modest. In the old days, a successful
career prosecutor was rewarded by becoming a judge,
but with the growth of the public-defender establish¬
ment, even this route of reward is subject to competi¬
tion.
As a result, most young prosecutors—however
unwittingly—are actually training to be criminal
defense attorneys. The common career path is for law
school graduates to sign on with the prosecutor’s office
to get courtroom experience. Once they have learned
the ropes—and are perhaps beginning to take on fami¬
ly responsibilities—they switch, however reluctantly,
to the defense.
Make no mistake, this changeover is usually not
done without grave misgivings. For many dedicated
prosecutors, it is the most painful decision of their
entire lives. Yet the economic incentives are overpow¬
ering. A friend in Brooklyn was a career prosecutor
until he was dumped by a change in political adminis¬
trations. Reluctantly, he started representing interna¬
tional drug dealers. A few months later, my wife met
his wife on the street just as the latter was filing their
income tax returns. “Our quarterly estimated pay¬
ments are now more than our entire annual income
used to be,” she confided.
All this has filtered back to the law schools, where
criminal law is now taught from the “defense” per¬
spective. Granted, there is a certain residue of 60s radi¬
calism at work, but in economic terms, it just makes
sense. Alan Dershowitz flies his own Lear jet, while
Christopher Darden is hooted out of church. Thomas
Puccio may have made his reputation as federal prose¬
cutor in the Abscam cases, but he didn’t strike it rich
until he met von Billow.
The result is that, in nearly all high-profile cases,
the prosecutors appear young and inept, while defense
attorneys are seasoned and eloquent. None of the assis¬
tant district attorneys on the O.J. trial could have
made the fourth string on the “Dream Team.” In von
Billow’s retrial, Puccio and Dershowitz faced off
against a Rhode Island prosecutor who had been in
law school while the first case was being tried.
Dominick Dunne, covering the retrial, likened it to “a
football game between the New York Jets and Provi¬
dence High School.”
On the civil side, it is the plaintiff attorneys who
are at the end of their career path, playing for sums
large enough to start a foundation with. Defense attor¬
neys are more likely to be corporate drones working
on straight salary. There are no multi-million-dollar
contingency fees on the side of the defense. There is
no Association of the Trial Lawyers of America push¬
ing the interests of civil defendants in Congress. Plain¬
tiff work attracts all the professional excitement, as
attorneys constantly mine new ground for malpractice
and class-action suits. As usual, the law schools and
professional associations follow suit.
How can some balance be restored to both these
systems? Tort reform is wending its way through Con¬
gress, although whatever progress is made can be
32 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
Neil Shigley
quickly undone by the judiciary and new theories
emanating out of the law schools. In criminal matters,
however, the solution could be to harness the greed
and entrepreneurial instincts of the legal profession to
the task of punishing people for criminal offenses.
How might this be done?
Here’s one proposal. Let’s just say to hell with it
and decriminalize crime. All muggings, rapes, rob¬
beries, and murders could then be treated as civil
rather than criminal matters. That would cure all the
handwringing about the “awesome powers of the
state” and put the alleged criminal and the victim back
on equal footing. “Let it all in” would become the
standard for admission of evidence. The jury would
hear the whole story and the public would be assured
of some reasonable facsimile of the truth.
What about punishment? That’s no problem,
either. A finding of “fault” would require the defen¬
dant to pay the plaintiff the usual sky’s-the-limit
award for punitive damages. Of course, a sober soul
might object that while that would do for O.J. Simp¬
son, an indigent defendant wouldn’t have a chance of
compensating his victim. Simple solution: The state
could make a “loan” to cover the damages. The guilty
party would then repay this loan by working at the
minimum wage at a state workhouse. In other words, a
murderer might spend the rest of his life trying to
compensate friends and relatives of the victim—the
kind of mixture of civil and criminal penalties that the
Old Testament, for example, recommends.
Would the best criminal attorneys respond on
behalf of crime victims? We already know. The largest
civil award ever made in a prominent criminal matter
was the $7.57 million judgment against Norman Mail¬
er buddy Jack Abbott in favor of the family of Richard
Ardan, the young waiter he murdered while on parole.
The Ardan family’s attorney in this civil proceeding?
F. Lee Bailey. ♦
Patrick J. Buchanan,
Left -Win ger
By David Frum
I n an increasingly conservative America, one politi¬
cal figure defiantly resists the historical tide. This
man still denounces big banks and multinational
corporations. Still unabashedly puts the interests of
the American factory worker ahead of those of the so-
called international trading system. Still refuses even
to contemplate any cuts in the generosity of big mid¬
dle-class spending programs like Medicare and Social
Security. This man is Patrick J. Buchanan, America’s
last leftist.
On the airwaves in New Hampshire, it is
Buchanan whose ads attack the House Republicans’
Medicare reform and accuse his party of cutting off
elderly Americans in order to aid the already privi¬
leged. As he told ABC’s Cokie Roberts in October,
“Their [the Republicans’] priorities are wrong. Why
didn’t they go after foreign aid? Why didn’t they go
after this $50 billion Mexican bailout which is unrav¬
eling before our eyes?”
In his campaign speeches, Buchanan bluntly
blames the falling wages of laborers like “the single
mom in a textile plant in South Carolina” on “invest¬
ment bankers on Wall Street” who want her “to com¬
pete with Asian workers who have to work for 25 cents
an hour.”
While Democrats nervously ingratiate themselves
with corporate donors, Mr. Buchanan roars his hostili¬
ty to big business. In the Wall Street Journal, he blasted
“multinational corporations whose loyalty is only to
the bottom line on a balance sheet,” and suggested the
U.S. government “inform these amoral behemoths
they are welcome to bring in their capital and build
their plants. But if they shut down factories here to
open overseas, they will pay a price for the readmis¬
sion of their goods to the American market.”
Indeed, measured by the traditional New Deal
standards—which candidate attacks corporations most
violently? which candidate opposes reductions in gov¬
ernment most strenuously?—Buchanan has moved to
the left of President Clinton. Hey: He’s moved to the
left of virtually every Democrat now holding national
office.
Does that sound implausible? Look at the world
for a moment through the eyes of a union organizer.
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 33
The intense new international competition in manu¬
facturing has forced American companies to be less
tolerant of impediments to the efficient use of labor—
namely, you. Which presidential candidate is promis¬
ing to shut that competition down and put you back in
the driver’s seat? Only Buchanan, who has called for a
20 percent tariff on Chinese exports, a 10 percent tariff
on Japanese goods, and an unspecified “social tariff”
on exports from Third World countries.
Now imagine yourself an embittered, downwardly
mobile ex-auto worker. Who speaks to your grievances
more directly than Pat
Buchanan, who but he
laments a “burnt out
Detroit, once the forge of
the Great Arsenal of
Democracy . . . ghost towns
that were once factory
towns . . . the stagnant
wages of an alienated work¬
ing class and a middle class
newly introduced to insecu¬
rity”?
Or put yourself in the
shoes of a marginal south¬
ern tobacco farmer, fearful
of what the North Ameri¬
can Free Trade Agreement
and global agricultural
trade liberalization will do
to his no-longer guaranteed
home market. Who is offer¬
ing a more convincing solu¬
tion to your problems than
Buchanan, with his attacks
on trade deals cooked up in
order “to ship Mexico tens
of billions to pay off its
creditors at Citibank and
Goldman Sachs.”
The party of Franklin
Delano Roosevelt now rep¬
resents a coalition of blacks,
working women, public employees, trial lawyers, col¬
lege professors, and high-tech industry. The party long
ago turned its back on the dwindling remains of Presi¬
dent Roosevelt’s original farmer/labor/white-ethnic
coalition. It’s a constituency without a voice, and
Buchanan is cleverly attempting to speak for it.
No doubt, Buchanan enlivens his Rooseveltian
politics with some spicy condiments all his own. The
adoption of the sinister term “New World Order” to
describe what is in fact a half-century-old bipartisan
free-trade policy is distinctively Buchananesque. True,
too, Buchanan advocates a program of flatter and low¬
er taxes on income and capital that mixes uncomfort¬
ably with his anticorporate rhetoric: the elimination of
inheritance taxes on estates of less than $5 million, for
instance. A vestigial Goldwaterism likewise manifests
itself in Buchanan’s continued championing of the old
social conservative single-issue causes: guns, abortion,
prayer in the schools.
But even so, compare the Pat Buchanan of today
with the Pat Buchanan of 1992. The core issue of his
primary challenge to Presi¬
dent Bush was the echt- Rea-
ganite accusation that Mr.
Bush had backslid on taxes.
Even the notorious speech
to the Republican conven¬
tion—for all its abandon¬
ment of the sunny and gen¬
erous tone characteristic of
Ronald Reagan—bashed
Governor Clinton for his
indifference to foreign poli¬
cy, his pro-choice views on
abortion, his sympathy to
gay rights, his opposition to
school choice, and the free-
spending ways of running
mate A1 Gore. All orthodox
Reagan doctrines.
Today, Buchanan still
forthrightly states his views
on abortion and gay
rights—if asked. But his
campaign speeches stress
arresting new themes: the
imminent menace of world
government, the greed of
„ international banks, the
(0
| power of tariffs to stop the
? deterioration in blue-collar
ra
"> wages, the urgency of pre¬
serving Medicare in some¬
thing close to its present form. This isn’t anything
remotely like the conservative Republicanism of the
Reagan era. What it sounds very much like instead is
the militant, resentful rhetoric roared by populist
Democrats from William Jennings Bryan onward.
The revulsion contemporary Democrats feel for
Buchanan only exposes how far that party has drifted
from its own past. After all, on the issues contempo¬
rary Democrats really care about—abortion, affirma¬
tive action, the environment—big business can often
34 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
be counted on to cooperate with reasonable grace. The
resentments that modern Democrats attempt to appeal
to are increasingly sexual (“They just don’t get it”)
rather than economic.
But there’s no reason to expect that economic
resentment will remain a taboo forever. It’s often said
that in good economic times, people are willing to tol¬
erate redistribution, but in bad times they hunker
down. Maybe. But put aside the 1960s and you see
another pattern. During the other prosperous decades
of the century—the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s—
Americans have trusted in the fairness of their eco¬
nomic system and ignored complaints that the game is
rigged. When good jobs are plentiful, voters believe,
not unreasonably, that the way to get ahead is to go out
and work. It’s in bad times—the 1930s, the 1970s—
that voters grumble against big business and big
banks. It’s in bad times that voters elect politicians
who offer them nostrums to create jobs.
And for one big category of workers—high-school
educated men under age 40—times have been gen¬
uinely hard for nearly 15 years. In them, a constituen¬
cy for resentful economics has reappeared. So far, the
politicians who have attempted to exploit this con¬
stituency have failed either because they were patent
phonies (Richard Gephardt in 1988) or because they
refused to reckon with these men’s conservative racial
views (Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988) or because they
labored under the weight of too much standard-issue
Democratic baggage (Tom Harkin in 1992). Buchanan
suffers from none of these handicaps, and it may take
him far.
T he important question for traditional conservative
Republicans is how far Mr. Buchanan should be
permitted to take the party. The success of Buchanan’s
1992 campaign has already begun to redirect the
Republican party to a more restrictive position on
immigration and a much harder line on affirmative
action. More successes in 1996—a new poll has him
running a strong second in New Hampshire to Bob
Dole—will enhance his influence even more. Should
he be welcomed or not?
In 1992, many conservatives suffered excruciating
difficulty in deciding. Only a month after William F.
Buckley concluded in a powerful cover story in
National Review that he found it impossible to defend
Buchanan against accusations of anti-Semitism, the
editors of that same magazine urged a “tactical vote”
for him in the New Hampshire primary. This time,
though, the choice ought to be easier. Conservatives
need to recognize that Buchanan’s politics is neither a
throw-back to the Taft Republicanism of the 1930s and
40s (Taft would have hacked up Medicare with gusto)
nor a renovation of Reaganite conservatism for the
post-Cold War world. It is something new: a populism
formed to seize the political opportunities presented
by strident multiculturalism and stagnating wages for
less-skilled workers.
Populism, though, seldom offers answers to the
problems it exploits. Cutting off immigration won’t
unify American culture. It is the alienation of black
America from the country’s old norms and ideals that
is dividing the United States, and on that subject
Buchanan has nothing to say.
Nor will restricting imports improve the lot of the
less-skilled: Tariffs are a tax that weighs most crush-
ingly on the poorest people in society. The apogee of
American protectionism—the years from the enact¬
ment of the McKinley tariff of 1890 to Woodrow Wil¬
son’s turn to free trade in 1913—was marked by the
most extreme income inequality and the most violent
labor strife in the nation’s history.
A s things are going, it is likely only a matter of time
before Buchanan himself recognizes the rapidly
mounting distance between his politics and those of
mainstream conservatism. His friend and fellow
columnist Sam Francis, whose ideas Mr. Buchanan
has increasingly echoed, has already dropped the word
“conservative” outright. The danger is not so much
that Buchanan will hijack conservatism as that, even
after he charges out of it on his way toward some
unscouted ideological destination of his own, his sta¬
tist and populist ideas will seep backward into it. At
least one House freshman, Zach Wamp of Tennessee,
seems to have been infected already: simultaneously
defending the Department of Energy (a big employer
in his district) while buffing up his anti-Washington
credentials by denouncing Treasury Secretary Robert
Rubin’s rescue of the Mexican peso.
Buchanan has never shied from a fight, and neither
should those Republicans who oppose him. Republi¬
cans who hold fast to the traditions of postwar conser¬
vatism that Buchanan is rejecting—small government
and American global leadership—should make clear
that they understand as well as Buchanan does the
immense difference between his politics and theirs.
He has turned his back on the fundamental convic¬
tions that have defined American conservatism for 40
years, and conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to say so.
After all, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, it isn’t we who
have left Pat Buchanan; it is Pat Buchanan who is
leaving us. ♦
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 35
Media
Wooden Panels in
Washington
H igh atop a glass and steel
Tower of Babble in Ross-
lyn, Va., Freedom Forum
CEO Charles Overby welcomed us
to “Publish or Perish,” a panel dis¬
cussion on the Unabomber mani¬
festo.
“In 1989, these facilities were
built for this very purpose, that we
would attract the best minds
around the country and the world
to talk about issues that are impor¬
tant to the media,” he explained.
“Today we have some of the best
thinkers in journalism around this
table. Thank you for being here.
You’re not only thinkers, but you’re
doers.”
These doers sure talked plenty.
Many of them Forum full-timers,
they have now graduated from the
unsavory rigors of actual news¬
gathering, and are wise to what
most practicing grunts will eventu¬
ally come around to: Talking about
covering events is infinitely prefer¬
able to covering them.
Syndicated columnist Carl
Rowan denounced the “cliche that
it’s our duty to disassociate our per¬
sonal feelings” about the decision
by the Washington Post to publish
the 35,000-word manifesto. Radio
and Television News Directors
Association president David
Bartlett called it “bad journalism as
well as bad citizenship,” even as he
worried that “we will fall into the
role of being social engineers and
not journalists, and not fulfilling
our proper role.”
When the moderator asked for¬
mer USA Today editor John Quinn,
“Are people sounding too high and
mighty about this?” Quinn re¬
sponded: “I’m not smart enough to
By Matt Labash
take an ordinary news story and
escalate it into two and a half
months of anxiety.”
If that was a heartfelt sentiment,
Quinn clearly had no business
here. From the Freedom Forum to
the National Press Club to the
Annenberg Washington Program
to the American University, we are
living through the epidemic advent
of the Washington Media Panel,
where every media issue is the Big
Issue of the Day and, consequently,
warrants exhaustive and regular
discussion.
The Media Panel’s legacy can be
traced to a time well after the era
when journalists selected their
vocation for the reasons one chose
to become a cab driver or mill-
worker: i.e., to get out of the house
and earn some extra scratch. The
new breed came careening through
celebrity’s dog door in the early
70s, when the college-educated
Boys on the Bus roamed the earth
alongside the very New Classist
Woodward and Bernstein. As well-
to-dos packed the kids off to
Northwestern’s Medill School of
Journalism and the Columbia Jour¬
nalism School, the occupation was
lifted out of its blue-collar origins
into a “legitimate” profession and,
in some cases, high priesthood. A
new generation of journalists was
hatched, reporters whose desire to
write or broadcast stories was
mixed with the idea that they were
also analysts, students of the form,
defenders of the faith. In addition,
the controversies in which the
media became embroiled—liberal
bias, Janet Cookery, the excesses of
power—led to the creation of the
cud-chewing organizations listed
above, whose purpose is theoreti¬
cally to examine journalistic prob¬
lems but practically speaking, to
exonerate American journalistic
institutions from accusations of
bias and misbehavior.
Thus was born the Media Panel,
which consists, as one C-SPAN
executive suggests, of “journalists
talking to journalists about journal¬
ism”—or to put it less charitably, a
well-lit, over-air-conditioned mas-
turbatory exercise.
The Media Panelist is not pre¬
sent for monetary reasons, since
recompense is often limited to
lukewarm coffee and a mini-dan-
ish. For him, it is the love of the
sport, a way to mark his rightful
place in the debate, to forge friend¬
ships with other journalists, and,
most important, to trot the id out
for a full jaunt-and-spin down the
catwalk of the cerebral.
This, as any C-SPAN watcher
knows, does not make for snappy
dialogue. And if Oscar Wilde was
correct in observing that “dullness
is the coming of age of serious¬
ness,” it is instructive to note that
most panelists are seasoned, solemn
people, which gives these symposia
an eery scenic uniformity: gray
eminences suffering from blandu-
lar diseases, chairs pulled snugly
around the snoregasbord with
Bisquick jowls flailing over Wind¬
sor spread collars, never pausing
except to sip from beaded water
pitchers, convinced that any idea,
no matter how small the nub, is
worth exploring ad infinitum.
“They’re really boring, but
[these people] get off on this crap,
they love to sit around and talk,”
says Andrew Rosenthal, Washing-
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 37
ton editor of the New York Times,
who generally detests panel discus¬
sions but is recently returned from
a “Race and the Media” panel him¬
self. “I’m absolutely amazed that
people come to see these things. I
mean, what I have to say is in a
newspaper you can read any day of
the week.”
T he panels may aspire to
grandeur, but usually the con¬
versation turns back to every jour¬
nalist’s favored subject: himself.
“There’s always brow-beating, the
beating of the chest,” says Jonathan
Salant, who as past president of the
Society of Professional Journalists
has put on his share of panels. “It’s
a chance for us to do some self-crit¬
icism, which is technically a bad
term because it’s reminiscent of the
Communists.”
Indeed, denizens of Mao’s China
had to write letters of self-criti¬
cism—but they were usually in
prison and could refuse to do so
only under penalty of death. Wash¬
ington panelists do it for fun, and
quite publicly, taking full advan¬
tage of any opportunity to erect
goppy, verbal diarrhetic monu¬
ments to the ransacking of their
own profession.
Entire panels have been devoted
to these endeavors, such as Ameri¬
can University’s May program,
“Why Does Everyone Hate Us:
The Backlash Against the Media.”
Moderator Sandy Ungar, in a tone
as lulling as a dehumidifier or a
monologue on NPR (where it was
simulcast) offered this view: “It
seems now that reporters are re¬
garded about on par with used car
salesmen, the media has become so
unpopular. . . . Maybe reporters
have always been roundly disliked,
maybe that’s why our mothers
didn’t want us to become one.”
James Warren, the sad sack who
often serves as Washington’s Con¬
science for his chronic criticism of
speaking fees and other insider
practices in his Chicago Tribune col¬
umn even though he now holds a
chair on CNN’s Capital Gang, con¬
curred. “A lot of people do view us
as hypocritical, privacy-invading,
emotionally and practically remote,
paternalistic, prone to frequent
error,” Warren said, “and I think
there’s ample evidence to support
each one of those beliefs.”
NBC’s Gwen Ilill joined the
moaning: “Your reputation is the
only thing you’ve got going for you,
and as you know, everyone hates us,
so you don’t have much of that.”
Much like the Mexican Peni-
tentes, who scourge themselves
with mock crucifixions, self-
flagellation is a genre staple, part of
the worship service—self-loathing
as an excuse for navel-gazing.
“There’s a real climate of apology
right now,” Rosenthal explains.
“It’s very fashionable to attack the
press, and so if you’re in the press,
it’s fashionable to admit that you
deserve to be attacked.”
Which is why another hallmark
of the media panel is to bring in
ringers to play the role of Torque-
mada. Their job is to take the
media to the woodshed and apply a
good pasting, and if they have no
credentials to do so, so what?
M arion Barry’s attorney, the
late Kenneth Mundy, assayed
the part once on a panel called
“Sensationalizing the Sensational.”
“I get the impression,” Mundy
said, “that often the news people
are right out of Goebbels’s school of
Propaganda because they were cre¬
ating things, sensationalizing
things, that didn’t exist.” This from
the man who was relieved when
jurors thought his client’s crack
pipe contained baking soda.
But even in a defensive crouch,
and with an infusion of natural
conflict, it’s still a snooze-inducing
affair. “They sit around, they chew
the fat,” says the Media Research
Center’s Steve Kaminski. “It’s all
conventional wisdom said how
many different ways.”
Or one piece of wisdom, repeat¬
ed endlessly. Take Washington Post
columnist E.J. Dionne, who used a
National Press Club panel in Sep¬
tember to try out his neologistic
description of the new media age.
“The politics of moral annihila¬
tion,” he called it, retreading a
phrase that didn’t catch when he
first tried it out in ’94.
After repeating it two or three
more times in the afternoon’s
course, Dionne succeeded in creat¬
ing a new cliche. A Newsweek
reporter picked it up. “I was rather
struck by E.J.’s politics of moral
annihilation,” said Karen Breslau.
“If people haven’t had enough, will
we somehow police ourselves?” A
visiting fellow from the Joan
Shorenstein Center asked, “We’re
now in the period where there’s an
edge [in the tone of press coverage]
to the point of moral annihilation.”
You know they took the phrase
home and showed it to all their
friends. Kennedy biographer Rich¬
ard Reeves gave it a workout yet a
few days later in his national col¬
umn: “‘The politics of moral anni¬
hilation’ was the phrase E.J.
Dionne . . . used to characterize
the new political dialogue.”
Which is not to single out the
estimable Dionne for abuse, for it
was a fine tag line, a ripping little
zipper.
But forget that—it’s the cliched
ideas that spur the deafening
echolalia. If you missed James War¬
ren’s Dionne-like lament at the
Media self-loathers panel—“Exac¬
erbating [the public’s] reflexive dis¬
enchantment is deep and woeful
ignorance ... of our role in a
democracy”—maybe you heard it
four months prior at a Freedom
Forum panel. There, Jane Kirtley,
executive director of the Reporter’s
Committee for Freedom of the
Press, put it this way: “We have a
problem in American society and
that is most people don’t under-
38 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
stand the role of the press and
democracy.” This was no doubt
fleshed out at another Freedom
Forum panel called “The Media
and Democracy”—which had E.J.
Dionne as a panelist.
T his rampant repetition tends to
be the norm, for the only thing
the media love better than a media
panel is another media panel on the
exact same subject. If you missed
“Is the Press Out of Control: Can
Any White House Survive the
Press Today?” (featuring the out-of-
control Wolf Blitzer, Helen
Thomas, and David Broder) per¬
haps you could catch the Joan
Shorenstein Center’s “Clinton’s
Battles with the Press,” featuring—
yes! —E.J. Dionne as a panelist.
If you had to stay home to watch
Must-See TV and so missed the
Twentieth Century Fund’s “Presi¬
dent Clinton’s First Year with the
Media,” not to worry! American
University had “Coverage of Clin¬
ton One Year Later” to offer. And if
you couldn’t make “Bosnia and the
Bobbitts: The Blurring Line Be¬
tween Tabloid Journalism and the
Mainstream Press,” then thank
Dame Fortune for “Checkbook
Journalism: What Price News?”
where Kitty Kelley squared off
with Paul Erickson, attorney for
castrato John Bobbitt.
Not to be forgotten of course was
the American University’s Novem¬
ber ’94 panel on “Newt and the
News: Covering Gingrich’s Wash¬
ington,” which was surely nothing
like the Center for Media and Pub¬
lic Affairs panel on “Editorial Cov¬
erage of the 104th Congress”—
which itself happened to share
absolutely nothing with AU’s
“Media Coverage of the 104th
Congress,” featuring— yes! —E.J.
Dionne as a panelist.
D ionne does not own the
media-panel franchise. That
honor goes to the Kalb family,
which just might have the whole
game rigged. During one recent
lucky stretch, I watched Bernard
Kalb host his regular televised pan¬
el on CNN’s Reliable Sources on a
Sunday, only to see him show up as
a Unabomber panelist on a
Wednesday. On Thursday I attend¬
ed brother Marvin’s “Presidency
and the Press” panel (not to be con¬
fused with the Freedom Forum’s
“Press and the Presidency” panel)
with a cameo appearance by none
other than Bernard, which was also
attended by three additional Kalb
spawn: Deborah, Madeleine, and
Media
The Village Idiot
By Daniel Radosh
Phyllis, relatives all and no doubt
in on the fix.
Like the institution of the presi¬
dency and John Wayne Bobbitt’s
member, O.J. Simpson has inspired
his share of dialogue. There was the
Center for Equal Opportunity’s
“After O.J.” panel, not to be con¬
fused with AU’s “After the O.J. Tri¬
al and the March,” which most cer¬
tainly differed from AU’s “Sensa¬
tionalizing the Sensational: Les¬
sons from O.J. Simpson.” (These
lessons were drawn, mind you, in
September 1994, two weeks before
jury selection even began.)
But who could wait? The prob¬
lem, as Tribune Media bureau chief
Cissy Baker put it in the elevator
after the Unabomber panel, is that
“they don’t care.” “They” refers to
the vulgar herd— known as “read¬
ers” to some. “We’re sitting here
dissecting this and they’re onto the
next thing. They don’t care about
anything but O.J. right now—noth¬
ing. The government’s about to
shut down but so what? [They’ve]
got to sleep and wake up and eat
breakfast and dinner.”
And Cissy’s right, too. Those
sad, slope-foreheaded proles. After
the nine-hour shift, the bus ride
home, the Hamburger Helper, the
three hours in front of the big-
screen before passing out on the
couch with the empty Funyuns bag
astride their torso, those poor sucks
are lucky they have “us,” the Uber-
Gatekeepers, Democracy’s Colan¬
der, the finest minds from the finest
institutions airing it out, stimulat¬
ing discourse, stimulating ourselves
at three-hour midday luncheons.
Who better to lead them than
Carl Rowan, from whom pearls of
conventional wisdom drop like the
waters of the St. Lawrence River
over the Niagara? “Great panel,
Carl,” one fellow journalist told the
aged Rowan after his disquisition
on the Unabomer.
“Whew,” Rowan said. “I
could’ve gone all day.”
Of that, there’s little doubt. ♦
E arlier this month, the Village
Voice celebrated its 40th
anniversary with an enthusi¬
astic tribute to itself. That’s hardly
surprising—the New York weekly
has always been one of the most
self-obsessed publications going.
What was almost surprising was
the reminder—in the form of dust-
ed-off essays by Norman Mailer,
Joe Flaherty, Stanley Crouch, and
other old Voice hands—that there
was a time when it was actually
worth reading.
I’m too young to remember
those days, but the legend of the
Village Voice is one of New York’s
most enduring ones: the newspaper
of the counterculture back when
counterculture was a dirty word the
first time around; the writer’s
newspaper, where anything that
could happen in print did; the
muckraker, scooping the city and
national dailies; the leftist gadfly
that was secretly respected even by
those who most hated it. Whether
this reputation was ever wholly
deserved is a matter for reasonable
debate. What is inarguable is that
the Village Voice today is less a liv¬
ing legend than an embarrassing
joke.
I say this not with glee, but . . .
well, okay, with a little glee. But
also with some sorrow. If ever the
left needed a sharp critical voice
and the right a worthy sparring
partner, now is the time. In the last
several years, however, and the last
few months especially, the Village
Voice has abandoned any claim to
that title.
There is no space here for a thor-
Daniel Radosh writes a weekly column
for the New Mirk Press.
ough recap of the Voice’s tumul¬
tuous history, nor for juicy details
of the paper’s seething office poli¬
tics—a staple of New York media
gossip. Suffice it to say that many
backs are bloody with stab wounds,
and the editor in chief’s office has a
revolving door. The current inhabi¬
tant of that office, hired last year, is
Karen Durbin, a Voice writer in the
70s. Two months ago, after a num¬
ber of ominous signs, Durbin
unveiled a new look and new atti¬
tude for the Voice: shorter articles,
peppier design, more generically
fabulous. Observers partial to mid¬
life crisis metaphors have been
tossed a softball: The Voice turns
40, buys a flashy new sports car.
The publication that billed itself
40 years ago as a “newspaper
designed to be read” is now
designed to be skimmed at best.
How much attention do you have
to give to topics like rubber dresses,
backstage with the supermodels,
partying with Divine Brown (of
Hugh Grant hooker fame), and
folks who collect bubble bath con¬
tainers and David Letterman para¬
phernalia? The combination of
mid-70s identity politics and mid-
80s pop magazine style makes for a
confusing mix. Writers are as likely
to allude to Alicia ( Clueless ) Silver-
stone as Noam (no Cambodian
holocaust) Chomsky. Praise for
labor unions shares space with
phrenological readings of Newt
Gingrich’s head. When an article
breathlessly intones that “Body
modification is here to stay,” you
can’t help but suspect that the
whole thing is a put-on—a counter¬
culture parody of Seventeen maga¬
zine. Or vice versa.
Then of course there’s cyber-
40 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
everything. Well, not everything,
but “Jews in Cyberspace” and “A
Gay Chicano Lost in Cyberspace.”
Meaningless chatter about the
Internet is not exactly lacking in
current discourse, but the Voice
seems to believe that it’s crucial to
have at least one hipster on staff
who can write sentences like, “Let’s
have an f2f with this: Humans
would rather interact with each
other than with computers. That’s
why sex is on everyone’s hot list.”
The good news for peo¬
ple who want desperately to
avoid reading such claptrap
is that the Voice’s new
design renders text largely
unreadable. In an apparent
effort to be eye-catching, a
riot of different typefaces in
random sizes are scattered
across each page. Squeezed
into boxes and bubbles are
attempts at humor. A list of
“statistics to ponder” is a
rip-off of Harper’s Index
without the grace; “Reasons
why Rudy Giuliani ousted
Arafat from Lincoln Cen¬
ter” is a stab at a Letterman
top-10 list without, well,
funny jokes (“No. 4: beard
envy”).
In an editor’s letter
accompanying the redesign,
Durbin seems especially
proud of the institution of wider
margins, which she calls “a new
‘fifth column’ for our editors, writ¬
ers, and readers to be subversive
with.” As a reader, I use the fifth
column to write, “Boring!” (or
worse) next to most articles.
Because as annoying as the new
graphic design is, the Voice’s real
problem is an ideology that still
adheres to a very tired old design.
To put it simply, there is hardly
an article to be found that does not
include, if only implicitly, a sen¬
tence that begins, As a black
woman ... or As a gay Chi¬
cano ... or, more frequently, As a
white man who really doesn’t
deserve to have an opinion on the
matter. . . . After all these years,
the Voice is still chanting that old
mantra, the personal is political.
Fair enough, but it’s also exceed¬
ingly dull. Here’s the defining
moment of a typical column by
Adolph Reed: “A solid majority of
attendees at the stewards’ confer¬
ence were nonwhite, and they were
largely, if not predominantly black.
But Latinos and Asian-Americans
were also prominent in number, as
were whites.” Whoa, you sure you
haven’t left anyone out?
Census-taking of this nature
substitutes for critical thought
throughout the paper. In the TV
coverage, an article condemns the
“ethnic cleansing” of the Fox net¬
work, as if shows such as Sinbad,
M.A.N.T.I.S., and Townsend Televi¬
sion were canceled because they
starred black people, not because
they were awful. In the film pages, a
forum on the movie Kids focuses on
the questions, Is it sexist? Is it
racist? Is it ageist? and, for GenX
appeal, What if it had starred Alicia
Silverstone?
Not that such questions
shouldn’t be asked per se, but all
too often the obsession with identi¬
ty politics drags the Voice into
absurdity. In an article titled “The
Unbearable Whiteness of Journal¬
ism,” media critic James Ledbetter
devotes several paragraphs to
counting the number of people of
color at individual publications,
including his own. “There are 18
nonwhite staff members out of
approximately 80. . . . That in¬
cludes one black woman as features
editor and another as chief
of research, about as high as
people of color ever get in
the industry. In the middle
ranks, however, the num¬
bers are less impressive: as
of last week, two out of 18
senior editors, two out of 17
staff writers. Breaking those
numbers down a bit more,
one senior editor is Asian,
one black...” Okay, I’ll
spare you the rest. The
howler, of course, is not just
the fact of the bean count¬
ing but the claim that a
shortage of minorities is
limiting the Voice’s perspec¬
tive. Does this paper really
need to be more sensitive?
There is some room to
fudge these matters when
the occasion demands. In a
puff piece about a perfor¬
mance artist, for instance, the
unfortunate problem of the man
being white is dodged by describ¬
ing him as “the only child of an
Italian immigrant father and Ital-
ian-American mother.”
The Voice is at its most disturb¬
ing when it permits ideology not
just to replace but actually to
obscure facts. In a story about the
September murder of a female jog¬
ger in Central Park, media critic
Richard Goldstein fumed at the
way “every white woman in run¬
ning shoes was corralled for com¬
ment” and wondered why this case
attracted more attention than nine
others in the last five years. “To
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November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 41
answer that question,” wrote Gold¬
stein, “we needed to know each vic¬
tim’s race.” The clear implication is
that September’s victim attracted
media attention because she was
white. No wonder Goldstein goes
out of his way not to give her name:
Maria Monteiro Alves. In any other
Voice story, she’d be Latina.
In another crime report, Ed
Morales tackled the strange story of
17-year-old Carlos Ariel Santos
Ortega (this time we got the full
name), who nearly instigated a riot
when he claimed that a police offi¬
cer threw him out a window.
Although Ortega later confessed
that he had actually jumped in
order to escape the cop—who
wasn’t even coming after him—
Morales chose to focus on “the
police department’s enduring
record of questionable practices
involving Latino communities.”
Which does not include, in case
you missed it, throwing people out
of windows.
O n those shocking occasions
when people of color come
together for a cause antithetical to
the Voice’s agenda, the paper’s con¬
clusion is usually that the masses
have been duped. When an inner-
city community voted overwhelm¬
ingly to expel an Afrocentric youth
group called Zulu Nation in favor
of the Police Athletic League, the
Voice sided with the Zulu Nation
spokesman who said, “We tried to
tell the residents, ‘You don’t under¬
stand what’s about to go down:
martial law in the projects. . . .
Stop being fooled. It’s a cover-up.’”
Which brings us to another
important element of Village Voice
politics: paranoia. Sample victims
of covert oppression include a
Colombian artist whose sculptures
were damaged by customs officials
(“This is not a coincidence, this is a
policy,” she claimed. “I was judged
and condemned and my work was
destroyed”) and a radio host who
insisted he’s been getting more
parking tickets since he began
denouncing the “Fuhrmanization”
of the criminal justice system
(“The fantasy I have is that there’s
an organization not unlike the
Aryan Brotherhood whose mem¬
bers are cops, district attorneys,
court officers, and prison guards”).
A midst all of this nonsense, it
should be pointed out, the Voice
does have a handful of writers who
are either intelligent, witty, or both:
essayist Nat Hentoff, political
reporter Tom Carson, advertising
critic Leslie Savan, and slash-and-
burn sex columnist Dan Savage,
among others. Their opinions and
styles are divergent, but they all
know how to think for themselves,
an uncommon attribute at the
Voice. For example, another writer
recently offered this reluctant sup¬
port for A1 Sharpton: “In the
absence of any strong progressive
resistance to the black conserva¬
tives riding the Republican wave, I
had to admit Sharpton’s mission
had a sort of loopy appeal.” But
why settle for an unreconstructed
buffoon like Sharpton just because
he’s there? If strong progressive
resistance is called for, it’s the job of
a paper like the Voice to provide it,
not to wistfully go along with the
next best thing.
It should also be said that this is
hardly the first time someone has
documented the fall of the Village
Voice. A 1991 Voice cover story was
headlined, “Why I Hate the Village
Voice.” That article echoed a 1975
one by Hentoff, who asked,
“What’s Become of the Voice?” In
1969 an aide to Mayor John Lind¬
say declared, “The Voice isn’t as
important as it once was, five years
ago, even three.”
Russ Smith, the editor of the
New York Press (a Voice rival to
which I contribute a column), likes
to say that the Voice doesn’t keep
getting better and then worse, it
just continually attracts new read¬
ers who inevitably become disillu¬
sioned with it. That may be the
case, but these days it’s difficult to
believe that anyone who has never
read the Voice before would be like¬
ly to give it a chance in the first
place. When it comes down to it,
the Voice has nothing left to say. ♦
Design
Year of the Ugly Dollar
By Henry Hope Reed
O nly the Russians, it would
seem, are concerned about
the promised change in
the design of our paper currency.
The C-note, the first to be altered,
is the favorite in the old Soviet
Henry Hope Reed is the author of The
Golden City and The New York
Public Library: Its Architecture and
Decoration. His forthcoming book on
the United States Capitol is to be pub¬
lished by WW Norton & Co.
Union. There, no less than $15 bil¬
lion circulate, mostly in $100 bills.
By contrast, Americans have been
conspicuously silent on the matter.
The Treasury’s excuse for the
change: easy counterfeiting thanks
to laser copiers and improved digi¬
tal machines. Among the obstacles
contrived to discourage counterfeit¬
ers are a new large portrait of Ben¬
jamin Franklin with lines that
smudge when copied and a water¬
mark of Franklin visible when the
42 / The Weekly Standard
November 27,1995
AZ 00000000 A
ixiVni \mii:iihoiiXus'
note is placed against a
light.
So much for several
of the technical
changes. What we are
being offered is, in
actuality, a wholly new
bill in terms of design.
First, there is the type¬
face of the numerals
and letters, squat in
shape, known as En¬
gravers Bold, surely one
of the ugliest invented
in the last century.
Ornamental detail has been
reduced. This combination of new
factors makes for a very ugly
design. Possibly the most puzzling
change is placing Franklin off cen¬
ter—with no compensating detail
for balance. We are, it seems, still in
the Modern Era, where a designer
seeks originality, no matter how
disturbing, for its own sake.
Probably the high point in the
design of our paper currency was
the turn of the century. Then, as
Pierce Rice, author of Man As Hero:
The Human Figure in Western Art,
has observed, mural painting set
the standard. The bank notes “were
all conceived in elaborate allegori¬
cal terms, with the civic spirit
expressed in rich figure composi¬
tion.”
With the passing years the notes
were simplified, notably in the loss
of the figures. The present designs
were fixed in 1929. What remained
of the aim to achieve something vi¬
sually pleasing? Only the use of tra¬
ditional ornaments once associated
with public buildings. The bayleaf
with bayberry is one (see the ob¬
verse of the dollar bill). Also, the
scroll (obverse of the five-dollar and
twenty-dollar bills) and the ribbon
(obverse and reverse of the twenty-
dollar bill). The most decorative
device is the acanthus leaf, the cen¬
tral ornament of the classical tradi¬
tion. In fact, the acanthus has been
declared, along with the baby, the
signal symbol of Western art.
W ith the coming of modern art,
the acanthus disappeared
along with all ornament, surviving
only in old buildings, old objects,
and . . . our paper currency. It has
been a most conspicuous standout,
an affirmation of Western tradition
overlooked by the modernists.
Now, as Treasury has decided to
abandon it, we see signs of the clas¬
sical’s return, at least in architec¬
ture. Perhaps the best recent exam¬
ple of the grand tradition is to be
found in Washington in the United
States Department of State. The
largest of its diplomatic reception
rooms, the Benjamin Franklin
State Dining Room, boasts
Corinthian columns whose gilt cap¬
itals have the customary cluster of
acanthus leaves. It is the work of
the Philadelphia architect John
Blatteau and a splendid augury of
our classical future.
To this classical future Treasury
is blind. What can Treasury do, on
opening its eyes to the ugliness of
the new notes? Why not simply
redesign them along the lines of the
old notes! Let the portraits of our
great men, to begin with, be cen¬
tered on the bills. Why need they
be out of kilter? Or the Treasury
powers could call for a
design competition set
within the frame of the
classical tradition. Or,
again, they might sim¬
ply call for several new
designs, always along
classical lines, and
choose one.
Certainly, it does
seem that, if the process
is not corrected, 1995
will be known in the
future as the Year of the
Ugly Dollar. ♦
November 27,1995
The Weekly Standard / 43
“This is petty. I’m going to say up front it’s petty and [my press secretary] Tony Blankley will
probably say that I shouldn’t have said it, but... I think, frankly, when you land at Andrews Air
Force Base and you’ve been on the plane for 25 hours and nobody has talked to you and they ask
you get off by the back ramp ... you just wonder, where is their sense of manners?”
—Newt Gingrich, November 15,1995, speaking at the venerable Sperling breakfast with key newsmakers
Parody
“ r I 'his is petty. I’m going to say up front it’s petty, and my press secretary, Tony
_L Richelieu, will probably say I shouldn’t have said it, but I think, frankly, when
you land at Elba and you’ve been on the boat there for 25 hours and nobody has talked
to you and they ask you to get off by the back gangplank, you just wonder, where is their
sense of manners? You know what? Maybe I should go back and take over France.”
Sperling Breakfast with Napoleon Bonaparte
January 12,1815
“ r T~'his is petty. I’m going to say up front it’s petty, and my press secretary, Tony Trot-
_L sky, will probably say I shouldn’t have said it, but I think, frankly, when you
arrive at the Finland Station and you’ve been in a sealed train car for 25 hours and
nobody has talked to you and they ask you to get off through the dinette car, you just
wonder, where is their sense of manners? Let’s see how they like it if I surround the
Winter Palace.”
Sperling Breakfast with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
September 11,1911
“ f I 'his is petty. I’m going to say up front it’s petty, and my press secretary, Tony Exo-
_L dus, will probably say I shouldn’t have said it, but I think, frankly, when you
climb up Mount Sinai and you’ve been wandering through the desert for 40 years and
nobody has talked to you and they ask you to go down the mountain the back way so
you don’t interfere with their big golden-calf party, you just wonder, where is their sense
of manners? Maybe I should just break the tablets.”
Sperling Breakfast with Moses
The Eighth ofNisan, 1125 BCE
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